How-To Tutorials - Server-Side Web Development

Nine years ago, in Australia, a Computer Science graduate named Martin Dougiamas was trialing a web tool he'd developed to help teachers create lessons online. Inspired by his own experiences with the outback "School of the Air". Martin's Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment offered tutors a way to connect remotely with their students in a collaborative and supportive workspace. Did any of us foresee back then just how global a phenomenon Moodle would become? Now used by over 31 million students in over 44 thousand sites in over 200 countries, Moodle has truly changed the face of learning. With improved access to the internet, and with commercial companies being quick to spot a potential money-earner, many such Learning Management Systems have arisen since then. What makes Moodle special, however, is the fact that it has remained as Open Source technology. Anyone can use Moodle; everyone can make Moodle better. While offcial Moodle Partners will give you peace of mind if you want Moodle installed at your establishment, you are also entirely free to go for it alone. If you need advice, whether of a pedagogical or technical nature, ask in the forums at https://moodle.org/ where the doors are never closed. If you spot an error or a bug, then someone (perhaps even you) will fix it. If you have an idea for a "plug-in" that might be useful for other Moodlers worldwide, you can put forth your suggestion to the community. The world changes constantly and Moodle changes with it. Since its official "birth" in 2002, Moodle has gone through several full versions and a number of stable releases in between. You can even catch up on all the bug fixes and minor tweaks by downloading the weekly stable "+" build. This year, however, sees the advent of the latest, biggest, and most enhanced version: Moodle 2.0. It's a new "take" on an established package. It is rich with new features, and it retains all that was good from Moodle 1.9, blended with new ideas and improvements, suggested and developed by the huge Open Source community. Moodle 2.0 has been a long time in the making. Its arrival became somewhat of an in-joke on the forums of www.moodle.org. Over the last couple of years, the answer to many a query would has been "You can't do that yet, but you will be able to in Moodle 2.0" prompting one Moodle Partner to comment that alongside better navigation, cleaner appearance, more controlled activities, enhanced modules, and improved interaction, Moodle 2.0 was expected to "sort out wars and world famine". Well, they haven't quite managed that, (Although there's still time for Moodle 3.0!), but there are suffcient new features in Moodle 2 to warrant a close look. Looks cleaner, moves faster Previous versions of Moodle came with pre-installed themes, such as Cornfower or Wood, making an average Moodle site easily recognizable when meandering along the Internet. The Downloads tab on http://moodle.org/ links to a Themes section offering an array of other contributed "skins" for Moodle to enhance its appearance. Despite this, users still complained Moodle looked "clunky" in contrast with other, commercial Learning Management Systems. In recent years, the adoption of Moodle has broadened from universities and schools to major charities, businesses, and non-governmental organizations. They want integration with their websites and a clean, professional look. Moodle 2.0 has done away with the previous themes and will ultimately include 20 brand new themes, of which Boxxie , as seen in the following screenshot, is one: In the following screenshot you'll note that the Navigation block on the left has been docked to the side— this is a totally new way of moving around in Moodle 2.0. We have the option of saving space and docking — or of expanding the block as with the calendar to the right: Within a course the Navigation block will show links to individual sections and expand to the activities in those sections. It is now possible to rename the topic sections so that these names appear in the links rather than numbered topics. If you look at the following screenshot, we are in a course French for Beginners and Introduction is actually topic 0 and First Steps in French is topic 1. Note also that the link at the top My Home takes the user straight to their MyMoodle page. A new way of managing your content In Moodle 1.x, the Resource module offered the teacher in a course the ability to upload their documents, create web pages in Moodle, or even display a directory of materials. Users, who had particularly large files, say SCORM packages or multimedia for example, were able to upload via FTP once they knew the directory number for their course and were granted the rights to do so. Moodle 2.0 does away with most of this, using a different philosophy for file management. It has more functionality and is more secure; however, for some it might initially appear more complex to manoeuvre. Compare and contrast the Add a resource… drop-down in Moodle 2.0 (on the left) and Moodle 1.9 on the right: Note the simpler, clearer terms: File (instead of link to a file or web site) Folder (instead of Display a directory) Page (instead of Compose a web page/Compose a text page) URL (instead of link to a file or web site) While you are still able to upload all your word-processed documents and Powerpoint presentations, you can also easily embed media from other sites such as http://www.youtube.com/ or http://www.flickr.com/ from the new text editor (based on the popular tinyMCE editor as used in WordPress for example). Here's a screenshot of the so-called File Picker where you can see that, alongside files already in Moodle and files you might want to upload, there is a link and the facility to search YouTube: More places to have your say With the addition of a Comments facility in Moodle 2.0 it is now easier than ever for users to give feedback, voice their opinions and generally make their presence felt in your online community. A Comments block may be included on your course page to give the students the opportunity to rate the course or suggest improvements, as shown in the following screenshot: We get far more control over the location and positioning of blocks in Moodle 2.0. Due to this we're not just restricted to having the Comments block (or others) on our course page. Most screens will allow us to add a block now, so we could for example have comments on the diffculty of Quiz questions, or comments on the suitability of a particular uploaded resource. The same commenting feature has also been applied to the standard Moodle blog, such that users may now, at last, comment on each others' entries. Existing activities updated and improved A lot of time and effort has gone into making existing Moodle modules such as the Wiki, Quiz, and, Workshop easier to manage and more user-friendly. The latter are two of my favorites, both very powerful yet not immediately intuitive, particularly to new users. While I found the results they gave worth the initial hours spent figuring out how to set them up, I also found that many teachers felt daunted by their complexity. As a trainer I always felt the need to apologize before I showed people how to use the Quiz, and I only went through the Workshop settings on request from advanced users. Open Source, by its nature, depends on collaboration, and several Moodle developers and enthusiasts have made significant changes to the Quiz and Workshop modules – in fact, the Workshop module has been virtually rewritten for Moodle 2.0, so if you shied away from it before, now is definitely the time to give it another chance. This has improved the display and the search facility of the Quiz question bank, making it not only easier to locate and reuse previously made questions but also simplifying the process needed to create a new quiz from scratch — making the Moodle Quiz a realistic option for a new user to tackle without fear of confusion. The changes to the Workshop now give us a clear view of the different stages of the assessment process: Moodle has always had a Wiki module but with limited functionality. Some users preferred alternative wikis such as the OUwiki or NWiki instead. Indeed, http://moodle.org/ itself chose Mediawiki for its comprehensive and collaborative documentation. Moodler. The new, improved wiki for Moodle 2.0, incorporates features from OUwiki and NWiki and we'll investigate how they can enhance our students' learning experience. Moodle's built-in blog feature has always been very limited, for example, offering no comment facility. Attached as it is to a user's profile meant that a student could only have one blog, rather than a number of blogs according to which course they were in. Again, for this reason, blogging Moodlers around the world looked elsewhere — such as to WordPress or to the Open University's OUBlog. Moodle's blog is now much enhanced. If you have an external blog you can now import its posts (based on a feed URL and on tags) and use it within Moodle. You can now also associate an entry to a particular course, attach more than one file to your entry, have a proper RSS feed, and (with the Comments API mentioned earlier) make it possible for permitted users finally to give you their thoughts on your thoughts! Another successful vehicle for the exchanging of ideas is the Messaging block. This block is controversial in some circles, such as in schools with younger learners, where some consider it a distraction of the MSN type while others see it as an essential means of instant communication. The messaging block has been revamped and is now event-driven, allowing users to control which messages they receive and how.

(For more resources on Moodle, see here.) New look – new wording Let's compare the former view of the Add a Resource drop-down menu with the new one. In the following screenshot, the left side shows us the Moodle 2.0 view and the right shows us the Moodle 1.9 view: The first thing to notice is that the wording is simpler –no more confusion amongst teachers as to what constitutes a web page as opposed to a text page; no more explanation needed that Display a directory actually just means Show a folder of my resources. The developers of Moodle 2.0 have taken onboard comments made by trainers and frequent users that certain terms were misunderstood by beginners. In the past, I myself have had to reassure newbies that even though they think they know nothing about web design, it is safe to select Compose a web page because doing so will simply bring up a text box where you can type your information or instructions straight into Moodle. Similarly, not everyone understands that a directory is just a fancy name for a folder that can house a number of your resources. This has now been made clearer. The selection Link to a file or web site has also been altered as these are now dealt with in two different ways. Let's take each option one at a time and study it in more depth. Adding a file The link File replaces the Moodle 1.9 Link to a file or web site option and is the place where, within your course, you would ordinarily upload and display files such as a Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow or a PDF resource. Selecting this from the drop-down gives us the editing screen, the top part of which is shown in the following screenshot: In our How to Be Happy course, our teacher, Andy, is going to upload an Open Office (odt) file with a tip a day for staying cheerful in February, a somewhat grim month in the Northern Hemisphere. Here's how we do it: For Name, as in earlier versions of Moodle, type the text you wish students to click on to access the resource. For Description, type a description which we can later decide to display or not. An Admin can set it so you aren't required to type a description. Click Add to start uploading the document – the File Picker appears: If it's not offered by default, click Upload this file… Add the author name and license type Then, as with Moodle 19, click Browse… to locate the document and then Upload this file… to upload it. You'll be returned to the main editing screen where the document appears as a blue link. As we scroll down, and with Advanced set to Show, we see other settings, some new, and some familiar from previous versions of Moodle but with extra functionality: Display: Choose how you want the file to appear and if you want the actual file name and/or its description to be shown. Advanced: With this enabled, you can decide the size of the pop up window and whether or not to filter the content Common Module settings: (as with Moodle 1.9) Decide whether to make the document visible or not and to set it for groups/groupings (which are now enabled by default) Restrict availability: This will only appear if the setting has been enabled in site administration and is a feature that lets you decide when and under what conditions the file may be accessed. Activity completion: This will only appear if you've enabled it in your course. It's a feature allowing students to check off what they have done or teachers to set activities to be automatically checked as complete under certain circumstances. Save: According to your preference, as with Moodle 1.9 Displaying a file As we went through the settings to upload and show our February Beat The Blues tips, we noticed a drop-down option Display. It gives a variety of ways a file such as our .odt document can appear on the course page in Moodle 2.0. How they display will depend on their file type. Display: Automatic Leave this as the default if you want Moodle to decide for you! In the case of Andy's slideshow, it's the traditional way of displaying an uploaded document, where once clicked on, it appears with a prompt box saying something like (depending on your browser) "do you want to open or save this file?" Display: Embed This will show the Moodle page with heading, blocks, and footer. It will show the title/description of the item and display the file directly in the page as well, so is good for videos, flash animations and so on. Display: Force download When a user clicks on the file, the web browser pops up with a "where do you want to save this file?" box. Display: Open This offers no Moodle heading, blocks, footer or description; it just shows the file as it is. Display: In pop-up This will cause the link to the file to appear in a pop up window before prompting you to open or download it. You can set the size of the pop up window on the Advanced settings page. Site administration | plugins | Activity modules | file gives us two other display options if so desired. These are: Display: In frame This will show the Moodle heading and the file description, with the file displayed in a resizable area below Display: New window This is very much like 'in pop-up', but the new window is a full browser window, with menus and address bar, and so on Resource administration If we click to update our file once it has been uploaded, we can see a new area in the Settings block, giving us options to manage this uploaded resource. We've seen this before: when clicking to update an item, we can tweak it from here. Let's take a look at these: Edit settings Here's where we update the details, display options, and so on (obviously!). Locally assigned roles and Permissions Moodle 1.9 gave us the facility to assign roles and permissions locally to an individual resource, so this is not new. In Moodle 2.0 the site administrator has more control over who can assign which roles by default. Check Permissions This is new however and enables to us be doubly certain our students are allowed (and not allowed!) to access what we want them to. Let's try an example: suppose Andy hides his February tips until the end of January but that he would like one particular student, Emma, to be able to access them in advance of time. He will allow her to view the February document even though it is hidden. He needs to ensure she doesn't have the right to see any other of the hidden files until the appropriate time. Here's what to do: In Locally assigned roles, give Emma the teacher role. This will allow her to view hidden activities, and therefore, our hidden February tips. In Check permissions, select Emma and click Show this user's permissions. This brings up a table showing what Emma's permissions are in this file. She can view hidden activities, and therefore, would be able to see the hidden February resource in advance of the other students. We see that because Emma's been assigned locally the role of teacher in our February document she is allowed to view the hidden file—but as she is still a student in the course as a whole, she doesn't have this right elsewhere –so we are safe!

(For more resources on Alfresco, see here.) Web Scripts allow you to develop entire web applications on Alfresco by using just a scripting language—JavaScript and a templating language—FreeMarker. They offer a lightweight framework for quickly developing even complex interfaces such as Alfresco Share and Web Studio. Besides this, Web Scripts can be used to develop Web Services for giving external applications access to the features of the Alfresco repository. Your Web Services, implemented according to the principles of the REST architectural style, can be easily reused by disparate, heterogeneous systems. Specifically, in this article, you will learn: What REST means and how it compares to SOAP What elements are needed to implement a Web Script A lightweight alternative to SOAP Web Services The term Web Services is generally intended to denote a large family of specifications and protocols, of which SOAP is only a small part, which are often employed to let applications provide and consume services over the World Wide Web (WWW). This basically means exchanging XML messages over HTTP. The main problem with the traditional approach to Web Services is that any implementation has to be compliant with a huge, and complicated set of specifications. This makes the application itself complex and typically hard to understand, debug, and maintain. A whole cottage industry has grown with the purpose of providing the tools necessary for letting developers abstract away this complexity. It is virtually impossible to develop any non-trivial application without these tools based on SOAP. In addition, one or more of the other Web Services standards such as WS-Security, WS-Transaction, or WS-Coordination are required. It is also impossible for any one person to have a reasonably in-depth knowledge of a meaningful portion of the whole Web Services stack (sometimes colloquially referred to as WS-*). Recently, a backlash against this heavyweight approach in providing services over the Web has begun and some people have started pushing for a different paradigm, one that did not completely ignore and disrupt the architecture of the World Wide Web. The main objection that the proponents of the REST architectural style, as this paradigm is called, raise with respect to WS-* is that the use of the term Web in Web Services is fraudulent and misleading. The World Wide Web, they claim, was designed in accordance with REST principles and this is precisely why it was able to become the largest, most scalable information architecture ever realized. WS-*, on the other hand, is nothing more than a revamped, RPC-style message exchange paradigm. It's just CORBA once again, only this time over HTTP and using XML, to put it bluntly. As it has purportedly been demonstrated, this approach will never scale to the size of the World Wide Web, as it gets in the way of important web concerns such as cacheability, the proper usage of the HTTP protocol methods, and of well-known MIME types to decouple clients from servers. Of course, you don't have to buy totally into the REST philosophy—which will be described in the next section—in order to appreciate the elegance, simplicity, and usefulness of Alfresco Web Scripts. After all, Alfresco gives you the choice to use either Web Scripts or the traditional, SOAP-based, Web Services. But you have to keep in mind that the newer and cooler pieces of Alfresco, such as Surf, Share, Web Studio, and the CMIS service, are being developed using Web Scripts. It is, therefore, mandatory that you know how the Web Scripts work, how to develop them, and how to interact with them, if you want to be part of this brave new world of RESTful services. REST concepts The term REST had been introduced by Roy T. Fielding, one of the architects of the HTTP protocol, in his Ph.D dissertation titled Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures (available online at http://www.ics.uci.edu/ ~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm). Constraints In his work, Dr. Fielding introduces an "architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems" called Representational State Transfer (REST). It does so by starting from an architectural style that does not impose any constraints on implementations (called the Null Style) and progressively adds new constraints that together define what REST is. Those constraints are: Client-Server interaction Statelessness Cacheability Uniform Interface Layered System Code-On-Demand (optional) Fielding then goes on to define the main elements of the REST architectural style. Foremost among those are resources and representations. In contrast with distributed object systems, where data is always hidden behind an interface that only exposes operations that clients may perform on said data, "REST components communicate by transferring a representation of a resource in a format matching one of an evolving set of standard data types, selected dynamically based on the capabilities or desires of the recipient and the nature of the resource." Resources It is important to understand what a resource is and what it isn't. A resource is some information that can be named. It can correspond to a specific entity on a data management system such as a record in a database or a document in a DMS such as Alfresco. However, it can also map to a set of entities, such as a list of search results, or a non-virtual object like a person in the physical world. In any case, a resource is not the underlying entity. Resources need to be named, and in a globally distributed system such as the World Wide Web, they must be identified in a way that guarantees the universality and possibly the univocity of identifiers. On the Web, resources are identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). A specific category of URIs are Uniform Resource Locators (URL) , which provide a way for clients to locate, that is to find, a resource anywhere on the Web, in addition to identifying it. It is also assumed that URIs never change over the lifetime of a resource, no matter how much the internal state of the underlying entities changes over time. This allows the architecture of the Web to scale immensely, as the system does not need to rely on centralized link servers that maintain references separated from the content. Representations Representations are sequences of bytes intended to capture the current or intended state of a resource, as well as metadata (in the form of name / value pairs) about the resource or the representation itself. The format of a representation is called its media type. Examples of media types are plain text, HTML , XML, JPEG, PDF, and so on. When servers and clients use a set of well-known, standardized media types, interoperability between systems is greatly simplified. Sometimes, it is possible for clients and servers to negotiate a specific format from a set that is supported by both. Control data, which is exchanged between systems together with the representation, is used to determine the purpose of a message or the behavior of any intermediaries. Control data can be used by the client, for instance, to inform the server that the representation being transferred is meant to be the intended new state of the resource, or it can be used by the server to control how proxies, or the client itself, may cache representations. The most obvious example of control data on the Web is HTTP methods and result codes. By using the PUT method, for example, a client usually signals to a server that it is sending an updated representation of the resource. REST in practice As we mentioned, REST is really just an abstract architectural style, not a specific architecture, network protocol, or software system. While no existing system exactly adheres to the full set of REST principles, the World Wide Web is probably the most well-known and successful implementation of them. Developing Web Services that follow the REST paradigm boils down to following a handful of rules and using HTTP the way it was meant to be used. The following sections detail some of those rules. Use URLs to identify resources It is important that you design the URLs for your Web Service in such a way that they identify resources and do not describe the operations performed on said resources. It is a common mistake to use URLs such as: /widgetService/createNewWidget /widgetService/readWidget?id=1 /widgetService/updateWidget?id=1 /widgetService/deleteWidget?id=1 whenever, for instance, you want to design a web service for doing CRUD operations on widgets. A proper, RESTful URL space for this kind of usage scenario could instead be something like the following: /widgets/ To identify a collection of widgets /widgets/id To identify a single widget. Then again, a RESTful interaction with a server that implements the previous service would be along the lines of the following (where we have indicated the HTTP verb together with the URL): POST /widgets/ To create a new widget, whose representation is contained in the body of the request GET /widgets/ To obtain a representation (listing) of all widgets of the collection GET /widgets/1 To obtain a representation of the widget having id=1 POST /widgets/1 To update a widget by sending a new representation (the PUT verb could be used here as well) DELETE /widgets/1 To delete a widget You can see here how URLs representing resources and the appropriate usage of HTTP methods can be used to implement a correctly designed RESTful Web Service for CRUD operations on server-side objects. Use HTTP methods properly There are four main methods that a client can use to tell a server which kind of operation to perform. You can call them commands, if you like. These are GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. The HTTP 1.1 specification lists some other methods, such as HEAD, TRACE, and OPTIONS, but we can ignore them as they are not frequently used. GET GET is meant to be used for requests that are not intended to modify the state of a resource. This does not mean that the processing by the server of a GET request must be free of side effects—it is perfectly legal, for instance, to increment a counter of page views. GET requests, however, should be idempotent. The property of idempotency means that a sequence of N identical requests should have the same side effects as a single request. The methods GET, HEAD, PUT, and DELETE share this property. Basically, by using GET, a client signals that it intends to retrieve the representation of a resource. The server can perform any operation that causes side effects as part of the execution of the method, but the client cannot be held accountable for them. PUT PUT is generally used to send the modified representation of a resource. It is idempotent as well—multiple, identical PUT requests have the same effect as a single request. DELETE DELETE can be used to request the removal of a resource. This is another idempotent method. POST The POST method is used to request that the server accepts the entity enclosed in the request as a new subordinate of the resource identified by the URI named in the request. POST is a bit like the Swiss army knife of HTTP and can be used for a number of purposes, including: Annotation of existing resources Posting a message to a bulletin board, newsgroup, or mailing list Providing a block of data, such as the result of submitting a form, to a data-handling process Extending a database through an append operation POST is not an idempotent method. One of the main objections proponents of REST raise with respect to traditional Web Service architectures is that, with the latter, POST is used for everything. While you shouldn't feel compelled to use every possible HTTP method in your Web Service (it is perfectly RESTful to use only GET and POST), you should at least know the expectations behind them and use them accordingly.

(For more resources on Alfresco, see here.) One way of looking at the Web Scripts framework is as a platform for implementing RESTful Web Services. Although, as we have seen, your service won't actually be RESTful unless you follow the relevant guiding principles, Web Scripts technology alone does not make your services RESTful as if by magic. Another way of looking at it is as an implementation of the Model-View-Controller, or MVC pattern. Model-View-Controller is a long-established pattern in Computer Science, often used when designing user-facing, data-oriented applications. MVC stipulates that users of the application send commands to it by invoking the controller component, which acts on some sort of data model, then selects an appropriate view for presenting the model to the users. While the applicability of MVC to Web application has often been debated, it is still a useful framework for partitioning concerns and responsibilities and for describing the roles of the various components of the Alfresco Web Scripts framework. In the latter, the role of controller is carried out by the scripting component. It should be stressed that, in the MVC pattern, the controller's role is purely that of governing the user interaction by selecting an appropriate model and a corresponding view for presentation, possibly determining which user actions are applicable given the present state of the application. It is not the controller's role to carry out any kind of business logic or to operate on the model directly. Rather, the controller should always delegate the execution of data manipulation operations and queries to a suitable business logic or persistence layer. In the context of Alfresco Web Scripts, this means that your controller script should avoid doing too many things by using the repository APIs directly. It is the responsibility of the controller to: Validate user inputs Possibly convert them to data types suitable for the underlying logic layers Delegate operations to those layers Take data returned by them Use the data to prepare a model for the view to display and nothing more All complex operations and direct manipulations of repository objects should ideally be carried out by code that resides somewhere else, like in Java Beans or JavaScript libraries, which are included by the present script. In practice, many Web Scripts tend to be quite small and simple, so this strict separation of concerns is not always diligently applied. However, as the size and complexity of controller scripts grows, it is considered as a good practice to modularize an application's logic in order to make it easier to follow and to maintain. Some people also have a preference for the relative safety of a static language like Java, compared to JavaScript, and for the use of modern Java IDEs. Therefore, it is frequent to see Web Scripts applications that place the very minimum of logic in controller scripts that use Java Beans to carry out more complex tasks. Coming to the view, which in Alfresco Web Scripts is implemented as FreeMarker templates, it should be noted that in a departure from the "pure" MVC pattern, the freedom accorded to the controller itself of choice between different possible views is rather limited as which view to use is determined exclusively by selecting a template for the specific output format requested by the user through the format specification in the request URL. The model that the view can access is also only partially the responsibility of the controller. Whereas the latter can add more objects to the model available to the view, it cannot reduce the visibility of the predefined, root-scoped objects. It is therefore possible for the view to perform quite a bit of logic without even having a controller to do it. This is why Web Scripts without a controller are acceptable. Whether this is a good practice or not is open to debate. The following diagram illustrates the steps that are involved when a Web Script is executed: The diagram can be explained as follows: An HTTP request, specifying a method and a URI is received. The dispatcher uses the HTTP method and the URI to select a Web Script to execute and executes the controller script. The controller script accesses the repository services by means of the Alfresco JavaScript API. The model is populated and passed to the FreeMarker template engine for rendering. FreeMarker renders a response using the appropriate template. The response is returned to the client. URL matching We've already seen how the dispatcher selects a particular Web Script by matching the URL of the HTTP request against the value of the url element in the descriptors of the registered Web Scripts. There is actually a bit more to this process than simple, exact matching, as we are going to see. First, let's have a look at the structure of a Web Script's request URL: http[s]://<host>:<port>/[<contextPath>/]/<servicePath>[/ <scriptPath>][?<scriptArgs>] The meaning of host and port should be obvious. contextPath is the name of the web application context, that is, where your application is deployed in your application server or Servlet container. It will often be alfresco, but could be share, as the Share application is able to host Web Scripts. It could be missing, if the application is deployed in the root context, or it could really be anything you want. The value of servicePath will usually be either service or wcservice. Using the former, if the Web Script requires authentication, this is performed using the HTTP Basic method. This means that the browser will pop up a username/password dialog box. When the latter is used, authentication is performed by the Alfresco Explorer (also known as Web Client). This means that no further authentication is required if you are already logged into the Explorer, otherwise you will be redirected to the Explorer login page. scriptPath is the part of the URL that is matched against what is specified in the descriptor. Arguments can optionally be passed to the script by specifying them after the question mark, as with any URL. With this in mind, let's look at the value of the <url> element in the descriptor. This must be a valid URI template, according to the JSR-311 specification. Basically, a URI template is a (possibly relative) URI, parts of which are tokens enclosed between curly braces, such as: /one/two/three /api/login/ticket/{ticket} /api/login?u={username}&pw={password?} Tokens stand for variable portions of the URI and match any value for a path element or a parameter. So, the first template in the previous list only matches /one/two/three exactly, or more precisely: http[s]://<host>:<port>/[<contextPath>/]/<servicePath>/one/two/three The second template here matches any URI that begins with /api/login/ticket/, whereas the third matches the /api/login URI when there is a u parameter present and possibly a pw parameter as well. The ? symbol at the end of a token indicates that the parameter or path element in question is not mandatory. Actually, the mandatory character of a parameter is not enforced by Alfresco, but using the question mark is still valuable for documentation purposes to describe what the Web Script expects to receive. We can now precisely describe the operation of the dispatcher as follows: When the dispatcher needs to select a Web Script to execute, it will select the one matching the specific HTTP method used by the request and whose URI template more specifically matches the script path and arguments contained in the request URL. A Web Script descriptor can also have more than one URI template specified in its descriptor, simply by having more than one <url> element. All of them are consulted for matching. The actual values of the path elements specified as tokens are available to the script as entries in the url.templateArgs map variable. For instance, when the /x/foo URL is matched by the /x/{token} template, the value of the expression url. templateArgs["token"] will be equal to foo. Values of request arguments are accessible from the script or template as properties of the args object, such as args.u and args.pw for the third example here. The format requested, which can be specified in the URL by means of the filename extension or of a format argument, need not be specified in the URI template. Authentication In the last version of our Web Script, we specified a value of user for the <authentication> element. When you use this value, users are required to authenticate when they invoke the Web Script's URL, but they can use any valid credentials. When a value of none is present, the Web Script will not require any authentication and will effectively run anonymously. This tends to not be very useful, as all operations using repository objects will require authentication anyway. If you require no authentication, but try to access the repository anyway, the script will throw an exception. A value of guest requires authentication as the guest user. This can be used for scripts accessed from the Explorer, where users are automatically logged in as guest, unless they log in with a different profile. A value of admin requires authentication as a user with the administrator role, typically admin. Run as Scripts can be run as if they were invoked by a user, other than the one who actually provided the authentication credentials. In order to do this, you need to add a runAs attribute to the <authentication> element: <authentication runAs="admin">user</authentication> This can be used, as in the previous example, to perform operations which require administrator privileges without actually logging in as an admin. As this can be a security risk, only scripts loaded from the Java classpath, and not those loaded from the Data Dictionary, can use this feature. The Login service Web Scripts that render as HTML and are therefore intended to be used by humans directly can either use HTTP Basic authentication or Alfresco Explorer authentication, as it is assumed that some person will fill in a login dialog with his username and password. When a script is meant to implement some form of Web Service that is intended for consumption by another application, HTTP Basic or form-based authentication is not always convenient. For this reason, Alfresco provides the login service, which can be invoked using the following URL: http[s]://<host>:<port>/[<contextPath>/]/service/api/login?u={username }&pw={password?} If authentication is successful, the script returns an XML document with the following type of content: <ticket>TICKET_024d0fd815fe5a2762e40350596a5041ec73742a</ticket> Applications can use the value of the ticket element in subsequent requests in order to avoid having to provide user credentials with each request, simply by adding an alf_ticket=TICKET_024d0fd815fe5a2762e40350596a5041ec73742a argument to the URL. As the username and the password are included, unencrypted, in the request URL, it is recommended that any invocations of the login service be carried out over HTTPS. Transactions Possible values of the transaction element are: none/li> required/li> requiresnew When none is used, scripts are executed without any transactional support. Since most repository operations require a transaction to be active, using none will result in an error whenever the script tries to call repository APIs. required causes the execution of the script to be wrapped in a transaction, which is the normal thing to do. If a transaction is already active when the script is invoked, no new transaction is started. requiresnew, on the other hand, always initiates a new transaction, even if one is already active. Requesting a specific format The format element in the Web Script descriptor indicates how clients are expected to specify which rendering format they require. This is what the element looks like: <format [default="default format"]>extension|argument</format> A value of extension indicates that clients should specify the format as a filename extension appended to the Web Script's path. For example: http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/myscript.html http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/myscript.xml A value of argument indicates that the format specification is to be sent as the value of the format URL parameter: http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/myscript?format=html http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/myscript?format=xml When the client fails to specify a particular format, the value of the default attribute is taken as the format to use. Once a format has been determined, the corresponding template is selected for rendering the model, after the script finishes its execution, on the basis of the template's filename, which must be of the form: <basename>.<method>.<format>.ftl Status Sometimes it can be necessary for the Web Script to respond to a request with an HTTP status code other than the usual 200 OK status, which indicates that the request has been processed successfully. There might also be a requirement that the response body be different depending on the status code, like, for instance, when you want to display a specific message to indicate that some resource could not be found, together with a status code of 404 Not Found. You can easily do this by manipulating the status object: if (document != null){ status.code = 404 status.message = "No such file found." status.redirect = true} You need to set the value of status.redirect to true in order for Alfresco to use an alternative error handling template. When you do this, the Web Scripts framework goes looking for a template with a file name of <basename>.<method>.<format>.<code>.ftl, like, for instance, myscript.get.html.404.ftl and uses it, if found, instead of the usual myscript.get.html.ftl. In this template, you can access the following properties of the status variable to customize your output: Property name Meaning status.code Numeric value of the HTTP status code (for example, 404) status.codeName String value of the status code (for example, Not Found) status.message Possibly set by the script status.exception The exception that caused this status If your script sets a status code between 300 and 399, which usually means a redirection, you can set the value of status.location to control the value of the location HTTP header: status.code = 301; // Moved permanentlystatus.location = 'http://some.where/else'

(For more resources on Alfresco, see here.) For the first step, you will see how to set up the .NET project in the development environment. Then when we take a look at the sample code, we will learn how to perform the following operations from your .NET application: How to authenticate users How to search contents How to manipulate contents How to manage child associations Setting up the project In order to execute samples included with this article, you need to download and install the following software components in your Windows operating system: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 for Microsoft .NET SharpDevelop 3.2 IDE The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 is the main framework used to compile the application, and you can download it using the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=333325fd-ae52-4e35-b531-508d977d32a6&displaylang=en. Before importing the code in the development environment, you need to download and install the Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0, which you can find at this address: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=018a09fd-3a74-43c5-8ec1-8d789091255d. You can find more information about the Microsoft .NET framework on the official site at the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/net/. From this page, you can access the latest news and the Developer Center where you can find the official forum and the developer community. SharpDevelop 3.2 IDE is an open source IDE for C# and VB.NET, and you can download it using the following URL: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Download/#SharpDevelop3x. Once you have installed all the mentioned software components, you can import the sample project into SharpDevelop IDE in the following way: Click on File | Open | Project/Solution Browse and select this file in the root folder of the samples: AwsSamples.sln Now you should see a similar project tree in your development environment: More information about SharpDevelop IDE can be found on the official site at the following address: http://www.icsharpcode.net/opensource/sd/. From this page, you can download different versions of the product; which SharpDevelop IDE version you choose depends on the .NET version which you would like to use. You can also visit the official forum to interact with the community of developers. Also, notice that all the source code included with this article was implemented extending an existent open source project named dotnet. The dotnet project is available in the Alfresco Forge community, and it is downloadable from the following address:http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/dotnet/. Testing the .NET sample client Once you have set up the .NET solution in SharpDevelop, as explained in the previous section, you can execute all the tests to verify that the client is working correctly. We have provided a batch file named build.bat to allow you to build and run all the integration tests. You can find this batch file in the root folder of the sample code. Notice that you need to use a different version of msbuild for each different version of the .NET framework. If you want to compile using the .NET Framework 3.5, you need to set the following path in your environment: set PATH=%PATH%;%WinDir%Microsoft.NETFrameworkv3.5 Otherwise, you have to set .NET Framework 2.0 using the following path: set PATH=%PATH%;%WinDir%Microsoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727 We are going to assume that Alfresco is running correctly and it is listening on host localhost and on port 8080. Once executed, the build.bat program should start compiling and executing all the integration tests included in this article. After a few seconds have elapsed, you should see the following output in the command line: .........****************** Running tests ******************NUnit version 2.5.5.10112Copyright (C) 2002-2009 Charlie Poole.Copyright (C) 2002-2004 James W. Newkirk, Michael C. Two, Alexei A.Vorontsov.Copyright (C) 2000-2002 Philip Craig.All Rights Reserved.Runtime Environment - OS Version: Microsoft Windows NT 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 CLR Version: 2.0.50727.3053 ( Net 2.0 )ProcessModel: Default DomainUsage: SingleExecution Runtime: net-2.0............Tests run: 12, Errors: 0, Failures: 0, Inconclusive: 0, Time: 14.170376seconds Not run: 0, Invalid: 0, Ignored: 0, Skipped: 0********* Done ********* As you can see from the project tree, you have some of the following packages: Search Crud Association The Search package shows you how to perform queries against the repository. The Crud package contains samples related to all the CRUD operations that show you how to perform basic operations; namely, how to create/get/update/remove nodes in the repository. The Association package shows you how to create and remove association instances among nodes. Searching the repository Once you have authenticated a user, you can start to execute queries against the repository. In the following sample code, we will see how to perform a query using the RepositoryService of Alfresco: RepositoryService repositoryService = WebServiceFactory.getRepositoryService(); Then we need to create a store where we would like to search contents: Store spacesStore = new Store(StoreEnum.workspace, "SpacesStore"); Now we need to create a Lucene query. In this sample, we want to search the Company Home space, and this means that we have to execute the following query: String luceneQuery = "PATH:"/app:company_home""; In the next step, we need to use the query method available from the RepositoryService. In this way, we can execute the Lucene query and we can get all the results from the repository: Query query =new Query(Constants.QUERY_LANG_LUCENE, luceneQuery);QueryResult queryResult =repositoryService.query(spacesStore, query, false); You can retrieve all the results from the queryResult object, iterating the ResultSetRow object in the following way: ResultSet resultSet = queryResult.resultSet;ResultSetRow[] results = resultSet.rows;//your custom listIList<CustomResultVO> customResultList =new List<CustomResultVO>();//retrieve results from the resultSetforeach(ResultSetRow resultRow in results){ ResultSetRowNode nodeResult = resultRow.node; //create your custom value object CustomResultVO customResultVo = new CustomResultVO(); customResultVo.Id = nodeResult.id; customResultVo.Type = nodeResult.type; //retrieve properties from the current node foreach(NamedValue namedValue in resultRow.columns) { if (Constants.PROP_NAME.Equals(namedValue.name)) { customResultVo.Name = namedValue.value; } else if (Constants.PROP_DESCRIPTION.Equals(namedValue.name)) { customResultVo.Description = namedValue.value; } } //add the current result to your custom list customResultList.Add(customResultVo);} In the last sample, we iterated all the results and we created a new custom list with our custom value object CustomResultVO. More information about how to build Lucene queries can be found at this URL: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Search. Performing operations We can perform various operations on the repository. They are documented as follows: Authentication For each operation, you need to authenticate users before performing all the required operations on nodes. The class that provides the authentication feature is named AuthenticationUtils, and it allows you to invoke the startSession and endSession methods: String username = "johndoe";String password = "secret";AuthenticationUtils.startSession(username, password);try{}finally{ AuthenticationUtils.endSession();} Remember that the startSession method requires the user credentials: the username as the first argument and the password as the second. Notice that the default endpoint address of the Alfresco instance is as follows: http://localhost:8080/alfresco If you need to change the endpoint address, you can use the WebServiceFactory class invoking the setEndpointAddress method to set the new location of the Alfresco repository.

(Read more interesting articles on Moodle 1.9 here.) Writing a sentence using two images It was such a beautiful day on the beach. The sun was shining in the sky, the sand was clean and glittering, the sea was clear, blue, and full of waves to play with. A perfect day to go for a swim. Alice and her little brother Kevin ran towards the sea together. They played, jumped, and slid with their body surfing boards and the waves. Suddenly, an animal appeared swimming between them. It was a dolphin. It jumped and threw water at them. Awesome! Alice was so happy because she had a new and very special friend on this vacation. Time for action – looking for two images to generate the exercise We are going to search for two royalty-free photos related to the beach in two specialized web pages. We are then going to use them to create a rich activity. Create a new folder in Windows Explorer (C:Beach). Open your default web browser and go to http://animalphotos.info. This web page allows us to search for royalty-free animal photos. Enter dolphin in the textbox and then click on the Search button. Browse through the results and select the desired photo of a single dolphin, as shown in the next image: Right-click on the desired image with the dolphin and select Save picture as in the context menu that appears. Save the file as image030101.jpg in the previously created folder, C:Beach. Open your default web browser and go to http://freedigitalphotos.net.This web page allows us to search for, and download, royalty-free photos. Enter sea in the textbox and then click on the Go button. The available photo thumbnails related to the entered keyword will appear. Browse through the results and select the desired photo of the sea, as shown in the next image: Right-click on the desired image thumbnail with the sea and select Save picture as in the context menu that appears. Save the file as image030102.jpg in the previously created folder, C:Beach. What just happened? We searched for two royalty-free photos related to the beach. In this case, we worked with two web pages, http://animalphotos.info and http://freedigitalphotos.net. We now have the following two digital photos ready to be used in our writing sentences using two images exercise: image030101.png: A dolphin image030102.png: The sea and the shore It is very important to use photos in this exercise because the idea is to train the description of real-life scenarios. Time for action – searching for related sounds We have two digital photos and we want to add related sounds to them. We are going to search for MP3 files to use as sound effects for the scenes in The Freesound Project website (http://www.freesound.org/): Open your default web browser and go to http://www.freesound.org. This web page allows us to search for, and download, sound files. It is necessary to register on this website in order to be able to download its files. The registration and access to its content are both free of cost. The Freesound Project website offers high-quality sounds with a Creative Commons License. The website offers thousands of samples.However, it does not offer songs. Click on Search under Search/Browse. Activate the Filenames checkbox. This way, the website will also search the file names of its sound files database. Enter sea mp3 in the textbox and then click on the Submit button. The results with the details of many sound files will appear. You can click on the Play button on the left-hand side of each sound file's name and preview the recorded sound, as shown in the next screenshot: Click on the selected file name (WavesOnBeach.mp3) or on its waveform. A new page with more detailed information will appear (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=14777), as shown in the next screenshot: Check the license information about the chosen file. Right-click on the Download label, located on the upper right-hand corner, and select Save target as in the context menu that appears. Save the file as sound030102.mp3 in the previously created folder, C:Beach. As this sound is related to the sea represented by the photo named image030102.jpg, we use the same name and another extension (.mp3 instead of .jpg). Next, go back to the web browser and repeat the aforementioned steps (2 to 7) to find and download sound related to a dolphin in MP3 format. In this case,repeat those steps searching for dolphin mp3 and save the sound file as sound030101.mp3 in the same folder. A nice recording of dolphins found on this website is common_dolphins_isla_san_jose_16jan2002.mp3 (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=52099). What just happened? We searched for two sound files in MP3 format because it is easy to integrate it into a Moodle exercise. We now have the following two digitalized sounds ready to be used in our writing sentences using two images and their related sounds exercise: sound030101.mp3: Dolphins on San Jose island sound030102.mp3: Waves on the beach Time for action – activating the MP3 player in Moodle As we are going to add the aforementioned sound files to our exercise in Moodle, we have to make sure that its multimedia plugins are enabled. Log in to your Moodle server. Click on Modules Filters | Manage| filters on the Site Administration panel. If the Multimedia Plugins filter appears in grey and displays a closed eye icon in the Disable/Enable column, you must click on this icon to change it to an opened eye icon. This way, Moodle will enable the multimedia plugins, as shown in the next screenshot: If you made changes, click on the Save changes button. Next, click on Modules Filters | Multimedia Plugins| in the Site Administration panel. Make sure that the Enable .mp3 filter checkbox is activated. If it is not, activate it and then click on the Save changes button. What just happened? We made the necessary changes in Moodle's configuration in order to make it possible to use its MP3 player. This way, we are going to be able to embed the sound files associated with the photographs, offering both visual and auditory perception resources in the exercise.

Creating a sentence using certain words Last Saturday, Alice went to the circus with her mother. Today is Priscilla's birthday and Alice cannot wait to tell her friends about the funny and dangerous things she saw in the circus. She was really scared when she saw the lions jumping through the flaming hoops. She enjoyed the little dogs jumping and twirling, and the big seals spinning balls. However, she has to remember some of the shows. Shall we help her? Time for action – choosing and preparing the words to be used in a sentence We are first going to choose the words to be used in a sentence and then add a new advanced uploading of files activity to an existing Moodle course. Log in to your Moodle server. Click on the desired course name (Circus). As previously learned, follow the necessary steps to edit the summary for a desired week. Enter Exercise 1 in the Summary textbox and save the changes. Click on the Add an activity combo box for the selected week and choose Advanced uploading of files. Enter Creating a sentence using certain words in Assignment name. Select Verdana in font and 5 (18) in size—the first two combo boxes below Description. Click on the Font Color button (a T with six color boxes) and select your desired color for the text. Click on the big text box below Description and enter the following description of the student's goal for this exercise. You can use the enlarged editor window as shown in the next screenshot. Use a different font color for each of the three words: Lion, Hoops, and Flaming. Close the enlarged editor's window. Select 10MB in Maximum size. This is the maximum size for the file that each student is going to be able to upload as a result for this activity. However, it is very important to check the possibilities offered by your Moodle server with its Moodle administrator. Select 1 in Maximum number of uploaded files. Select Yes in Allow notes. This way, the student will be able to add notes with the sentence. Scroll down and click on the Save and display button. The web browser will show the description for the advanced uploading of files activity. What just happened? We added an advanced uploading of files activity to a Moodle course that will allow a student to write a sentence that has to include the three words specified in the notes section. The students are now going to be able to read the goals for this activity by clicking on its hyperlink on the corresponding week. They are then going to write the sentence and upload their voices with the description of the situation. We added the description of the goal and the three words to use in the sentence with customized fonts and colors using the online text activity editor features. Time for action – writing and recording the sentence We must first download and install Audacity 1.2. We will then help Alice to write a sentence, read it, and record her voice by using Audacity's features. If you do not have it yet, download and install Audacity 1.2 (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/). This software will allow the student to record his/her voice and save the recording as an MP3 file compatible with the previously explained Moodle multimedia plugins. In this case, we are covering a basic installation and usage for Audacity 1.2. The integration of sound and music elements for Moodle, including advanced usages for Audacity, is described in depth in Moodle 1.9 Multimedia by João Pedro Soares Fernandes, Packt Publishing. Start Audacity. Next, it is necessary to download the LAME MP3 encoder to make it possible for Audacity to export the recorded audio in the MP3 file format. Open your default web browser and go to the Audacity web page that displays the instructions to install the correct version of the LAME MP3 encoder, http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3. Click on the LAME download page hyperlink and click on the hyperlink under For Audacity on Windows, in this case, Lame_v3.98.2_for_Audacity_on_Windows.exe. Run the application, read the license carefully, and follow the necessary steps to finish the installation. The default folder for the LAME MP3 encoder is C:Program FilesLame for Audacity, as shown in the following screenshot: Minimize Audacity. Log in to your Moodle server using the student role. Click on the course name (Circus). Click on the Creating a sentence using certain words link on the corresponding week. The web browser will show the description for the activity and the three words to be used in the sentence. Click on the Edit button below Notes. Moodle will display a big text area with an HTML editor. Select Verdana in font and 5 (18) in size. Write a sentence, The lion jumps through the flaming hoops., as shown in the next screenshot: Go back to Audacity. Resize and move its window in order to be able to see the sentence you have recently written. Click on the Record button (the red circle) and start reading the sentence. Audacity will display the waveform of the audio track being recorded, as shown in the next screenshot: You need a microphone connected to the computer in order to record your voice with Audacity. Once you finish reading the sentence, click on the Stop button (the yellow square). Audacity will stop recording your voice. Select File | Export As MP3 from Audacity's main menu. Save the MP3 audio file as mysentence.mp3 in your documents folder. Audacity will display a message indicating that it uses the freely available LAME library to handle MP3 file encoding, as shown in the next screenshot: Click on Yes and browse to the folder where you installed the LAME MP3 encoder, by default, C:Program FilesLame for Audacity. Click on Open and Audacity will display a dialog box to edit some properties for the MP3 file. Click on OK and it will save the MP3 file, mysentence.mp3, in your documents folder. Next, go back to your web browser with the Moodle activity, scroll down, and click on the Save changes button. Click on the Browse button below Submission draft. Browse to the folder that holds your MP3 audio file with the recorded sentence, your documents folder, select the file to upload, mysentence.mp3, and click on Open. Then, click on Upload this file to upload the MP3 audio file to the Moodle server. The file name, mysentence.mp3, will appear below Submission draft if the MP3 file could finish the upload process without problems, as shown in the next screenshot. Next, click on Continue. Click on Send for marking and then on Yes. A new message, Assignment was already submitted for marking and cannot be updated, will appear below the Notes section with the sentence. Log out and log in with your normal user and role. You can check the submitted assignments by clicking on the Creating a sentence using certain words link on the corresponding week and then on View x submitted assignments. Moodle will display the links for the notes and the uploaded file for each student that submitted this assignment, as shown in the next screenshot. You will be able to read the notes and listen to the recorded sentence by clicking on the corresponding links. Once you have checked the results, click on Grade in the corresponding row in the grid. A feedback window will appear with a text editor and a drop-down list with the possible grades. Select the grade in the Grade drop-down list and write any feedback in the text editor, as shown in the next screenshot. Then click on Save changes. The final grade will appear in a corresponding cell in the grid. What just happened? In this activity, we defined a simple list of words and we asked the student to write a simple sentence. In this case, there is no image or multimedia resource, and therefore, they have to use their imagination. The child has to read and understand the three words. He/she has to associate them, imagine a situation and say and/or write a sentence. Sometimes, it is going to be too difficult for the child to write the sentence. In this case, he/she can work with the help of a therapist or a family member to run the previously explained software and record the sentence. This way, it is going to be possible to evaluate the results of this exercise even if the student cannot write a complete sentence with the words. Have a go hero – discussing the results in Moodle forums The usage of additional software to record the voice in order to solve the exercises can be challenging for the students and their parents. Prepare answers of frequently asked questions in the forums offered by Moodle. This way, you can interact with the students and their parents through other channels in Moodle, with different feedback possibilities. You can access the forums for each Moodle course by clicking on Forums in the Activities panel.

Putting words inside an image with structure Great! Another vacation day! Alice loved the beach. It was her favorite place to have fun, but she was scared of forgetting what she had learned in school after playing so much on the beach. Therefore, she had an idea. She asked her mother to help her write down everything that she found around her.She had so many things to write down, because the beach was full of people: some of them were sunbathing, others swimming in the sea; there were also children building sandcastles and others playing with balls. Can we help her as well? Time for action – creating a scene We are going to create a scene using a background picture and then add other clipart inside it to represent each word. Start Inkscape and minimize it. You will use it later. Start Word 2007. You will be working in a new blank document. In this case, we will use Word 2007 to search for clipart. However, you can also create a scene with other clipart libraries. We will also use other applications that provide high-quality clipart in other visually rich exercises. Click on Insert Clip Art|. The Clip Art panel will appear on the right-hand side of the main window. Click on the Search in combo box and activate the Everywhere checkbox.This way, Word will search for clipart in all the available collections, including the Web Collections. Click on the Search for textbox and enter Beach. Click on the Go button. Position the mouse pointer over the desired clipart's thumbnail. Since you want to change the picture size without losing quality using Inkscape, remember to make sure that it is a WMF or an EMF file. Right-click on the desired clipart's thumbnail and select Preview/Properties in the context menu that appears. Word will display a new dialog box showing a larger preview of the scalable clipart and a temporary file name. Triple-click on the long path and file name shown after File. This way, you will be sure that the temporary file's full path is selected. Then, right-click on it and select Copy in the context menu that appears. Now, activate Inkscape—remember it was running minimized. You can use Alt + Tab or Windows + Tab. Don't close the clipart's preview window. Select File Import| from the main menu. Click on the Type a file name button (the pencil with a paper sheet icon) and paste the previously copied temporary file's full path in the Location: textbox. The path is going to be similar to C:UsersvanesaAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsTemporary InternetFilesContent.IE5WL240QUNMCj04354940000[1].wmf. Click on the Open button. The previously previewed clipart, the background for our scene, will appear in Inkscape's drawing area, as shown in the next screenshot: Return to Word 2007, and close the Preview/Properties dialog box. Repeat the aforementioned steps (6 to 13) for each vector graphic to add to the previously shown background picture, the beach. The next image shows three possible pictures: A bucket and a shovel A beach ball A sandcastle Click on one of the recently added pictures to select it. Eight double-headed arrows will appear in a rectangle around the selection. Drag-and-drop one of the diagonal double-headed arrows and scale the drawing both in the horizontal (X) and vertical(Y) directions. You can do it holding down the Ctrl key in order to maintain the original aspect ratio. Then, drag-and-drop the picture to the appropriate position inside the beach background. Repeat the aforementioned step for the other two pictures to create a scene as shown in the next image: Select File Save| from Inkscape's main menu. Save the file as image030201.svg in the previously created folder, C:Beach. What just happened? We combined several scalable vector clipart images to create a representation of a scene on the beach. Inkscape allowed us to define a background and add different elements on top of it. Each element represents a different word. Time for action – adding floating labels to the image Click on the Create and edit text objects button (a big A with a cursor on the lefthand side) or press F8. This function allows you to add text with different fonts and colors in Inkscape's drawing area. Select the desired font and size using the two combo boxes that appear on the upper left-hand corner of the window, below the main toolbar. Repeat the aforementioned steps (1 to 2) to write the following words as labels, with a layout similar to the one shown in the next image: Sandcastle Umbrella Beach ball Sea Shovel Bucket Once you enter each word, you can click on the desired color in the color palette. It is a good idea to use diverse colors to make it clear that they are different words. Select File Save| from Inkscape's main menu in order to save the changes made to the original Inkscape SVG file. Select File Export Bitmap|. A dialog box showing many export options will appear.Enter 72 on the first dpi (Dots Per Inch) textbox. Click on the Drawing button, and then on Export. Inkscape will export the drawing in PNG format. The exported bitmap graphics with the beach scene and the words at the bottom will be saved at C:Beachimage030201.png. What just happened? We created a representation of a scene on the beach using Inkscape and scalable vector clipart. We first added a background picture and then used vector graphics to add different elements related to specific words. We could change their size without losing quality and we could put them on top of the existing background. We added text labels for each word that represents an element in the scene. Finally, we exported the resulting image to the PNG format. Time for action – uploading the scene to Moodle We now have to upload the original SVG file and its bitmap representation, in order to add our exercise to an existing Moodle course. Log in to your Moodle server. Click on the desired course name (Beach). You can create a new course or use an existing one. As previously learned, follow the necessary steps to edit the summary for a desired week. Enter Exercise 2 in the Summary textbox and save the changes. Click on the Add an activity combo box for the selected week and select Upload a single file. Enter Dragging and dropping words in Assignment name. Select Verdana in font and 5 (18) in size—the first two combo boxes below Description. Next, select your desired color for the text. Click on the big textbox below Description and enter Putting words inside an image with structure. This is the description of the student's goal for this exercise. Press Enter and click on the Insert Image button (a mountain or a tree, according to the Moodle version). A new web page will appear displaying the title Insert image. Click on the chapter03 folder link and then click on the Browse button. Browse to the folder that holds the exported drawing and select the file to upload, image030201.png. Then click on Open and on the Upload button. The label File uploaded successfully will appear inside the File browser box. Next, click on the recently uploaded file name, image030201.png. The image will appear in the Preview box. Enter image in Alternate text and click on OK. The image will appear below the previously entered title. Remember that you can click on the Enlarge editor button to view more information on the screen. Press Enter and click on the Ordered list button (a list of 1, 2, and 3). Write the detailed steps to complete the exercise. Open this picture using Inkscape Drag-and-drop each word to match the corresponding element in the picture Save and upload the new picture Next, select the picture word written in the sentence that describes the first step. Click on the Insert Web Link button (a chain). A new web page will appear displaying the title Insert Link. Click on the Browse button and then on the chapter03 folder link. Click on the new Browse button that appears. Browse to the folder that holds the previously created Inkscape drawing with the scene (C:Beach) and select the file to upload, image030201.svg. Next, click on Open, on Upload, and on the file name link, as shown in the next screenshot: Moodle will display the URL for this Inkscape file in the URL textbox. Enter picture in the title textbox and click on OK. This way, the student is going to be able to download the Inkscape drawing by clicking on the word picture with a hyperlink, as shown in the next screenshot: Select 100 in the Grade combo box. Select 10MB in Maximum size. This is the maximum size for the file that each student is going to be able to upload as a result for this activity. However, it is very important to check the possibilities offered by your Moodle server with its Moodle administrator. Finally, scroll down and select Save and return to course. What just happened? We added the putting words inside an image with structure exercise to a Moodle course.The students are now going to be able to follow the instructions explained in the upload a single file assignment and download the Inkscape drawing to drag-and-drop words. We defined a hyperlink to the Inkscape drawing because the students are going to use it to drag-and-drop each word to the corresponding zone of the scene. The upload a single file assignment allowed us to describe the necessary steps to complete the activity, and it's also going to enable the students to upload their results as an Inkscape drawing. In this case, the necessary steps to complete the activity are just a few sentences in order to simplify the example. However, sometimes, it is necessary to write more instructions when you have to work with other applications such as Inkscape.

In this virtual classroom, we are going to enrich the use of vocabulary, because in the creation of these techniques we have to use keywords, which have to be used in a piece of writing. Mind maps are going to be designed according to the facilities that the different software provides us to exploit them. Pictures in mind maps—using Buzan's iMindMap V4 In this task, we are going to use the software of the inventor of mind maps: Buzan's iMindMap V4. We are going to work on the topic of robots and afterwards students are going to write an article about them. We are going to provide students with images of different robots, taking into account that a robot is not a silver rectangular human look-alike. They may have several shapes and can be used for different purposes. Read the next screenshot, which is taken from Buzan's iMindMap V4 software, about inserting images in a mind map: Getting ready Let's create a mind map related to robots with pictures. After creating the mind map, students are going to look at it and they are going to write an article about the topic. In this case, the mind map will be designed with images only so as to "trigger associations within the brain" of our students. You can download a free trial of this software from the following webpage: http://www.thinkbuzan.com/uk/. How to do it... After downloading the free trial (you may also buy the software), create a new file. Then follow these steps to create a mind map with images using the previously mentioned software: Choose a central image in order to write the name of the topic in the middle, as shown in the next screenshot: In Enter some text for your central idea,, enter Robots as shown in the previous screenshot and click on Create. Click on Draw and select Organic, and draw the lines of the mind map, as shown in the following screenshot: To add images to the mind map, click on Insert and select Floating image, as shown in the next screenshot: Click on View and select Image Library and search for images, as shown in the next screenshot: Another option is to look for an image in Microsoft Word and copy and paste the images in the mind map. Save the file. How it works... We are going to select the Weekly outline section where we want to insert the activity. Then we are going to create a link to a file. Later, we will ask students to upload a single file in order to carry out the writing activity. Follow these steps: Click on Add a resource and select Link to a file or website. Complete the Name block. Complete the Summary block. Click on Choose or upload a file. Click on Upload a file. Click on Browse and search for the file, then click on Open. Click on Upload this file and then select Choose. In the Target block, select New window. Click on Save and return to course. The mind map appears as shown in the following screenshot: There's more... We saw how to create a mind map related to robots previously; now we will see how to upload this mind map as an image in your course. Uploading the mind map as .png file If your students do not have this software and they cannot open this file, you may upload this mind map in the Moodle course as an image. These are the steps that you have to follow: Open the file and fit the mind map in the screen. Press the Prt Scr key. Paste (Ctrl + V) the image in Paint or Inkscape (or any similar software). Select the section of the mind map only, as shown in the next screenshot: Save the image as .png so that you can upload the image of the mind map in the Moodle course. Drawing pictures using pen sketch It is also possible to use a digital pen, also known as pen sketch, to draw elements for the mind map. For example, as we are dealing with robots in this mind map, you can draw a robot's face and add it to the mind map, as shown in the next screenshot: Creating a writing activity You may add the mind map as a recourse in the Moodle course or you may insert an image in it. In both cases, students can write an article about robots. If you upload the mind map in the Moodle course, you can do it in the Description block of Upload a single file and you do not have to split the activity in two. Adding data to pictures—creating a mind map using MindMeister In this recipe, we are going to work with MindMeister software, which is free and open source.We are going to create a mind map, inserting links to websites, which contain information as well as pictures. Why? Because if we include more information in the mind map, we are going to lead our students on how to write. Apart from that, they are going to read more before writing and we are also exercising reading comprehension in a way. However, they may also summarize information if we create a link to a website. So let's get ready! Getting ready We are going to enter http://www.mindmeister.com/ and then Sign up for free. There is one version which is free to use, or you may choose the other two that are commercial. After signing up, we are going to develop a mind map for our students to work with. There is a video which is a tutorial explaining in a very simple and easy way on how to design a mind map using this software. So it is worth watching. How to do it... We are going to enter the previously mentioned website and we are going to start working on this new mind map. In this case, I have chosen the topic "Special days around the world". Follow these steps: Click on My New Mind Map and write the name of the topic in the block in the middle. Click on Connect and draw arrows, adding as many New node blocks as you wish. Add a website giving information for each special occasion. Click on the Node, then click on Extras–Links | Links and complete the URL block, as shown in the next screenshot: Then click on the checkmark icon. Repeat the same process for each occasion. You can add icons or images to the nodes of the mind map. Click on Share Map at the bottom of the page, as shown in the next screenshot: Click on Publish and change the button to ON, as shown in the next screenshot: Select Allow edit for everybody (WikiMap), as shown in the previous screenshot. You can also embed the mind map. When you click on Embed map, the next screenshot will appear: Copy the Embed code and click on Close. Click on OK. How it works... After creating the mind map about special occasions around the world, we will either embed it or create a link to a website for our students to work on a writing activity. Here the proposal is to work through a Wiki because in Map Properties we have clicked on Allow edit for everybody (WikiMap) so that students can modify the mind map with their ideas. Select the Weekly outline section where you want to insert the activity and these are the steps you have to follow: Click on Add an activity and select Wiki. Complete the Name block. Complete the Summary block. You may either embed the mind map or create a link to a website, as shown in the next screenshot: Click on Save and return to course.

Introduction One of the most important features of relational database management systems—MySQL being no exception—is the use of indexes to allow rapid and efficient access to the enormous amounts of data they keep safe for us. In this article, we will provide some useful recipes for you to get the most out of your databases. Infinite storage, infinite expectations We have got accustomed to nearly infinite storage space at our disposal—storing everything from music to movies to high resolution medical imagery, detailed geographical information,or just plain old business data. While we take it for granted that we hardly ever run out of space, we also expect to be able to locate and retrieve every bit of information we save in an instant. There are examples everywhere in our lives—business and personal: Your pocket music player's library can easily contain tens of thousands of songs and yet can be browsed effortlessly by artist name or album title, or show you last week's top 10 rock songs. Search engines provide thousands of results in milliseconds for any arbitrary search term or combination. A line of business application can render your sales numbers charted and displayed on a map, grouped by sales district in real-time. These are a few simple examples, yet for each of them huge amounts of data must be combed to quickly provide just the right subset to satisfy each request. Even with the immense speed of modern hardware, this is not a trivial task to do and requires some clever techniques. Speed by redundancy Indexes are based on the principle that searching in sorted data sets is way faster than searching in unsorted collections of records. So when MySQL is told to create an index on one or more columns, it copies these columns' contents and stores them in a sorted manner. The remaining columns are replaced by a reference to the original table with the unsorted data. This combines two benefits—providing fast retrieval while maintaining reasonably efficient storage requirements. So, without wasting too much space this approach enables you to create several of those indexes (or indices, both are correct) at a relatively low cost. However, there is a drawback to this as well: while reading data, indexes allow for immense speeds, especially in large databases; however, they do slow down writing operations. In the course of INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs, all indexes need to be updated in addition to the data table itself. This can place significant additional load on the server, slowing down all operations. For this reason, keeping the number of indexes as low as possible is paramount, especially for the largest tables where they are most important. In this article, you'll find some recipes that will help you to decide how to define indexes and show you some pitfalls to avoid. Storage engine differences We will not go into much detail here about the differences between the MyISAM and the InnoDB storage engines offered by MySQL. However, regarding indexes there are some important differences to know between MySQL's two most important storage engines. They influence some decisions you will have to make. MyISAM In the figure below you can see a simplified schema of how indexes work with the MyISAM storage engine. Their most important property can be summed up as "all indexes are created equal". This means that there is no technical difference between the primary and secondary keys. The diagram shows a single (theoretical) data table called books. It has three columns named isbn, title, and author. This is a very simple schema, but it is sufficient for explanation purposes. The exact definition can be found in the Adding indexes to tables recipe in this article. For now, it is not important. MyISAM tables store information in the order it is inserted. In the example, there are three records representing a single book each. The ISBN number is declared as the primary key for this table. As you can see, the records are not ordered in the table itself—the ISBN numbers are out of what would be their lexical order. Let's assume they have been inserted by someone in this order. Now, have a look at the first index—the PRIMARY KEY. The index is sorted by the isbn column. Associated with each index entry is a row pointer that leads to the actual data record in the books table. When looking up a specific ISBN number in the primary key index, the database server follows the row pointer to retrieve the remaining data fields. The same holds true for the other two indexes IDX_TITLE and IDX_AUTHOR, which are sorted by the respective fields and also contain a row pointer each. Looking up a book's details by any one of the three possible search criteria is a two-part operation: first, find the index record, and then follow the row pointer to get the rest of the data. With this technique you can insert data very quickly because the actual data records are simply appended to the table. Only the relatively small index records need to be kept in order, meaning much less data has to be shuffled around on the disk. There are drawbacks to this approach as well. Even in cases where you only ever want to look up data by a single search column, there will be two accesses to the storage subsystem—one for the index, another for the data. InnoDB However, InnoDB is different. Its index system is a little more complicated, but it has some advantages: Primary (clustered) indexes Whereas in MyISAM all indexes are structured identically, InnoDB makes a distinction between the primary key and additional secondary ones. The primary index in InnoDB is a clustered index. This means that one or more columns of each record make up a unique key that identifies this exact record. In contrast to other indexes, a clustered index's main property is that it itself is part of the data instead of being stored in a different location. Both data and index are clustered together. An index is only serving its purpose if it is stored in a sorted fashion. As a result, whenever you insert data or modify the key column(s), it needs to be put in the correct location according to the sort order. For a clustered index, the whole record with all its data has to be relocated. That is why bulk data insertion into InnoDB tables is best performed in correct primary key order to minimize the amount of disk I/O needed to keep the records in index order. Moreover, the clustered index should be defined so that it is hardly ever changed for existing rows, as that too would mean relocating full records to different sectors on the disk. Of course, there are significant advantages to this approach. One of the most important aspects of a clustered key is that it actually is a part of the data. This means that when accessing data through a primary key lookup, there is no need for a two-part operation as with MyISAM indexes. The location of the index is at the same time the location of the data itself—there is no need for following a row pointer to get the rest of the column data, saving an expensive disk access. Secondary indexes Consider if you were to search for a book by title to find out the ISBN number. An index on the name column is required to prevent the database from scanning through the whole (ISBN-sorted) table. In contrast to MyISAM, the InnoDB storage engine creates secondary indexes differently. Instead of record pointers, it uses a copy of the whole primary key for each record to establish the connection to the actual data contents. In the previous figure, have a look at the IDX_TITLE index. Instead of a simple pointer to the corresponding record in the data table, you can see the ISBN number duplicated as well. This is because the isbn column is the primary key of the books table. The same goes for the other indexes in the figure—they all contain the book ISBN number as well. You do not need to (and should not) specify this yourself when creating and indexing on InnoDB tables, it all happens automatically under the covers. Lookups by secondary index are similar to MyISAM index lookups. In the first step, the index record that matches your search term is located. Then secondly, the remaining data is retrieved from the data table by means of another access—this time by primary key. As you might have figured, the second access is optional, depending on what information you request in your query. Consider a query looking for the ISBN numbers of all known issues of Moby Dick: SELECT isbn FROM books WHERE title LIKE 'Moby Dick%'; Issued against a presumably large library database, it will most certainly result in an index lookup on the IDX_TITLE key. Once the index records are found, there is no need for another lookup to the actual data pages on disk because the ISBN number is already present in the index. Even though you cannot see the column in the index definition, MySQL will skip the second seek saving valuable I/O operations. But there is a drawback to this as well. MyISAM's row pointers are comparatively small. The primary key of an InnoDB table can be much bigger—the longer the key, the more the data that is stored redundantly. In the end, it can often be quite difficult to decide on the optimal balance between increased space requirements and maintenance costs on index updates. But do not worry; we are going to provide help on that in this article as well. General requirements for the recipes in this article All the recipes in this article revolve around changing the database schema. In order to add indexes or remove them, you will need access to a user account that has an effective INDEX privilege or the ALTER privilege on the tables you are going to modify. While the INDEX privilege allows for use of the CREATE INDEX command, ALTER is required for the ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX syntax. The MySQL manual states that the former is mapped to the latter automatically. However, an important difference exists: CREATE INDEX can only be used to add a single index at a time, while ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX can be used to add more than one index to a table in a single go. This is especially relevant for InnoDB tables because up to MySQL version 5.1 every change to the definition of a table internally performs a copy of the whole table. While for small databases this might not be of any concern, it quickly becomes infeasible for large tables due to the high load copying may put on the server. With more recent versions this might have changed, but make sure to consult your version's manual. In the recipes throughout this article, we will consistently use the ALTER TABLE ADD INDEX syntax to modify tables, assuming you have the appropriate privileges. If you do not, you will have to rewrite the statements to use the CREATE INDEX syntax. Adding indexes to tables Over time requirements for a software product usually change and affect the underlying database as well. Often the need for new types of queries arises, which makes it necessary to add one or more new indexes to perform these new queries fast enough. In this recipe, we will add two new indexes to an existing table called books in the library schema. One will cover the author column, the other the title column. The schema and table can be created like this: mysql> CREATE DATABASE library;mysql> USE library;mysql> CREATE TABLE books (isbn char(13) NOT NULL,author varchar(64) default NULL,title varchar(64) NOT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (isbn)) ENGINE=InnoDB; Getting ready Connect to the database server with your administrative account.

(For more resources on Moodle, see here.) There are a number of tools in Moodle to find out the students' depth of understanding—some formal and some informal. There are also some tools that allow the students to assist themselves in their own knowledge consolidation. We will now investigate these tools in more detail. Implementing a glossary The glossary is a well known and commonly used module in Moodle, but it may not always be used as the effective teaching and learning tool that it can be. Given the jargon-rich nature of design and technology, it is also an important glue for the whole subject area. Checking the settings The key options here relate to the functioning of the glossary and how you use it as a teaching and learning tool. The first thing that needs to be done is to check the overall settings for the module in the administration section of the site. The settings are divided into three key areas: Default settings for the glossary module Settings for the entries in the glossary Format of the display styles The previous settings can be found on the administration panel in the Site Administration | Modules | Activities | Glossary section. Default settings The first section determines which functions of the glossary are generally available to the users of the module on the site. In the previous screenshot, the main options relate to the linking functions and comments on the entries themselves. For example, do you want to allow students to comment on the glossary entries? For a subject such as DT, you might wish to allow students to add their own understanding of terms. In some cases, there may be regional terms for some things which are different from the "formal" definition of a term, such as the term used for certain woodworking tools. As woodworking is an ancient craft, there are many different local terms to describe some of the equipments used. The glossary would then reinforce the social nature of the design as a part of a teaching method. Preventing duplicate entries As you can see in the previous screenshot, the default setting here would be to not allow duplicate entries in the glossary—although it can be enabled to perhaps show the nuances in a term or allow the term to be defined in another language, if your school has a partner school in another country. In some instances, you might have a definition that is the accepted definition, but also one that students might come across such as a building term. Likewise, you might have a definition relating to a usage as opposed to how a manufacturer might determine an item. Allowing duplication gives students a sense of how terms change, depending on how they are used and by whom. Allowing comments Allowing comments on the entries is useful for students to build up an internal dialog whereby they may be able to add examples of best practice to the definitions in the glossary relating to their on-the-job work experience. This is useful because students who had previously worked in a company and gained some experience of the job can leave a historical record to help the students who have just started the course or work. Automatically linking comments The linking of the glossary terms is useful if you use a consistent approach throughout your course design; in particular, if you use the Compose a web page function under Add a resource, as discussed earlier, rather than uploading the proprietary word-processed files, then Moodle will be able to link the terms through the database. However, please bear in mind that the linking function will add some load to your server and may not be appropriate in all cases, such as when using a server on a shared system. Linking definitions throughout the site allows students to have a better understanding of all the elements, as they work through them and when they forget some key terms. However, you need to remember that this links across an entire site and some definitions may clash across curriculum subjects. Therefore, there is a need for the duplicate entries. The ability to create a glossary for all the users on a site is only available to site administrators. Entry level default settings The following screenshot shows the options that are available for the entries, which are added to the glossaries. If enabled, the options shown in the following screenshot will automatically be enabled when the entries are made. Users still have the choice to disable the options like the automatic linking shown as follows: Again, you can link terms in the course to the glossary definitions, and if necessary, make the terms case sensitive. The case-sensitive option as well as the matching of whole words allows some fine tuning of the glossary. For example, you may make an entry for a law, which is HAM. If you enable the case-sensitive option on this entry, then a link will be created in the database when the specific term HAM is entered on a page in the course and not for every instance of hammer. This may be more useful with younger students when it is important for them to learn the key terms, but perhaps not so with older students. You can now save the settings you have chosen. If the changes have been applied for you by your site administrator, you can move directly to your course to begin using a glossary. Creating a glossary Once you or the site administrator have set up the module in the way that is most appropriate for your institution, teachers can then begin to apply them to their courses. We are assuming here that you have other subject areas on your Moodle site, therefore, we will focus on the course-level entries, but the principles are same. Enabling the glossary For this example, we will add a glossary of terms to our construction-based course. Younger students may be unfamiliar with this subject in many cases and they will, therefore, have a greater need for some ways of understanding the wealth of the terms. The same is true for Food Technology or Resistant Materials, but it is more likely that they would have at least encountered food-based products or materials in their lives. It is less likely that they had been involved in the construction of their environment or have working knowledge of these key terms. As with all the modules, the first action is to enable editing on the course to activate the activities drop-down menu. This requires clicking the button that follows: This will then show the activities menu from which you can select the glossary module Glossary from one of the many Add an activity' drop down menus, as shown in the following screenshot, to create a new glossary activity module. Editing the glossary Once enabled, added, or created, you can then name the glossary and determine some of the functionality you want in it to be available. Like all the other modules, these are related to time and display elements. The following screenshot shows some of the key settings such as the type of glossary and the display format. Most of these settings were determined at the site level, such as allowing duplicate entries or comments, but they can be changed by the staff as required. The key point here is that we make one glossary—a main glossary for the course. We make all the subsequent glossaries secondary, which means that we can export the terms into this main one, but this is the overall glossary for the course. We might have secondary glossaries for the human aspects of construction or health and safety, as opposed to the material elements for example. As this is a very graphical subject, we have enabled the display to be like an encyclopedia. This will allow staff and students to add images and video files to explain the terms they are defining in a better way. Rating entries If you are going to use the glossary in a more formal way, it would be useful to allow the students to rate the entries, so that they can peer assess each other's terms. If you set each student a number of terms to define as a homework exercise, you can allow the students to research and populate the glossary and for the other students to award marks. This makes the terms far more dynamic and real for the students. You might also invite your contacts from local companies to rate the students' definitions and give them feedback to help develop their understanding on a deeper level. This is enabled through the grading option, as shown in the following screenshot: The glossary can now be saved. Adding entries (categories) When we are adding entries, the first real requirement is to create some categories in which you can organize the terms. A category in this instance is a group of terms such as tools or techniques. If we had created one Moodle course to cover all the DT subjects, we might have a main glossary for DT and secondary glossaries for Food and Construction. This makes it more organized as well as making it easier to search for items. In this example, we are creating some glossary items relating to the term 'carpentry'. We need to create an overall category for this area. This is achieved by first adding a new category item by clicking on the Browse by category tab and then on Edit categories, as shown in the following screenshot: This will open the dialog window to create a new category for this glossary, as shown in the following screenshot: If you select to link the category, this whole sub-section will be revealed by a hyperlink to this term, which could be useful for newer students. Adding entries If the course you are managing incorporates all of the DT subjects, then you may wish to create a main glossary for DT and secondary glossaries for Food or Resistant Materials and so on. In this example, we have a course for Construction and the Built Environment, which is the main glossary. We are going to create categories to group the terms in the glossary for areas such as carpentry or electrical. With the categories set, it is now possible to add and organize the definitions for your course. This can be managed entirely by the staff or can be an exercise that allows student participation, such as a homework exercise as mentioned earlier. In this example, we are building up a definition for a particular woodworking joint. Once we have set the name and basic details, we can then categorize the entry and add some keywords for searches, as shown in the following screenshot: The entry can now be viewed by students as well as rated and commented upon. In the following instance, the student has not only rated the entry, but also added a comment with a link to a website they have found, which further illustrates the particular woodworking joint. Students could also embed a video stream from a video site, which would also help to explain the process more clearly. This level of collaborative learning is immensely powerful with this type of kinesthetic information. Students can now add their own entries as part of a homework routine or teaching strategy. As shown in the following screenshot, items added to the glossary are linked to other pages through the database. The terms are highlighted by Moodle and clicking on them will take users to the glossary page, which defines them. In this example, the word 'wood' is highlighted in green. When you click on this link, it will open the corresponding entry for wood in the glossary, as shown in the following screenshot. Mapping their minds Many aspects of design require students to sketch out their ideas in a graphical form in order to get to grips with the complexity and the various components. These sketches could be scanned and uploaded as formal assignments, but they could also be incorporated into the Moodle site through the use of an add-on called Mindmap. This is a third-party module that allows the students to map out their ideas using a basic interface and permits them to link and label the items on a screen. It can be saved by them in their area and can be viewed by the staff for guidance and support. The Mindmap module can be found at: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=1628&filter=1 Once the module has been installed, it is added to a course in a similar way as we add any other module, by turning the editing on. After choosing the drop-down activities menu, you can then add theMindmap module, as shown in the following screenshot: This will activate the dialog to set up the name and settings for the Mindmap module for the course.

(For more resources on Moodle 1.9, see here.) The ILP module, once installed and activated, allows you to set some quite detailed targets within courses and to fine tune reports to and about students in order to better motivate them in their learning. This type of power means that there are quite a few options associated with the module and you will need to use the ones that are best suited to your needs. There is also the capability to tie the system in with your institution's own Student Information System (SIS) or Management Information System (MIS)) through a database abstraction layer. If you require this level of integration, you will need to discuss this with your network team or the company that provides your Moodle hosting service. In the UK, at least you can discuss this functionality with a Moodle partner that specializes in system integration with MIS. You can find out more about this at http://moodle.com/integration/. The installation process will install two modules: targets and reports, as well as a number of ILP related blocks for your courses such as Personal Learning Plan and Student Information. The modules and blocks that are installed as part of this package have a number of related settings associated with them, which will need to be adjusted at the site administration level. If you are the site administrator, you can do this; if not, you will need to ask the site admin to make the necessary changes. Module settings: Targets and Reports The basic settings required are to be able to set targets and view reports, though there are numerous levels and complexities to this activity. Again, you will need to adjust these as required. The settings are in the site administration panel. You will see two new icons for the ILP modules, as shown in the following screenshot, namely, Report and Target: Each of these new modules has a corresponding settings link. Report options The settings for the report allow you to determine what reports are visible to staff and students, as well as what can be shared between students. Set the visibility and information as required by your particular course or institution. The first block of settings relate to how the reports are viewed and whether or not students are made aware of any interactions on the part of tutors, as shown in the following screenshot: In this case, we are choosing to be able to see the status of each individual student and to send them messages when comments or concerns are posted. However, we have chosen not to show reports just within a course, as we are likely to teach students across the faculty. Therefore, it is more useful to get an overview of how they are working. The concerns we might highlight could be that a student has been missing key practical classes or has not attended their work placement. The second block of settings determines what types of reports you would like to see. It may be that you are only responsible for a certain aspect of a student's learning, in which case you may not enable all of the reporting functions. In this case, we are choosing to see all reports, as shown in the following screenshot. This may be the case if you are a personal tutor for some students and wish to get a detailed overview of their progress and activities, as well as be able to talk to them about any concerns raised by other staff. For example, a student to whom you are a personal tutor might express an interest in Product Design and therefore you might consult with colleagues in this subject area to set key targets for the student to achieve. These targets and achievements can be discussed with the students or with the students and their parents, to make sure that they are working towards their desired goals in technology. We can now save these settings in order to use all of these features on courses that we teach. Target options The settings for the Target module are similar—again the default for course-specific targets is disabled, which makes it easier to see student information across subjects. The main settings here, as shown in the following screenshot, relate to how messages are relayed to students about their targets. For example, there may be a modification to an exam board specification that makes a student's established target not such a high priority. If you are teaching students at a distance and do not see them regularly, then this would be a useful way to notify them of the changes. ILP blocks: Personal Learning Plan (PLP) The block element of ILP has several more settings that allow some customization of the block once initiated on your course page. It is shown under the add blocks menu as the Personal Learning Plan (PLP), showing that it is something that students have more ownership of as they can add targets and concerns themselves. Main options The default settings would be "No", but in this case, we would like the students to be able to see a complete range of information in relation to themselves and their courses in design technology. If the user guide link is set to 1, then it will show a link to the online guide for the module. This might be something to set up once everyone is comfortable with the use of the ILP. Student information block The final settings on the blocks page are for Student Info. The settings here allow you to customize messages and instructions for students in relation to the information they put in the PLP, such as information about themselves that only they or their teacher can see, or shared information that all other students will be able to see. The student can then use this space to fill in information about themselves, which will tie in with their targets and concerns and give a full picture of them for staff and even potential employers. The student's view of this becomes available through the course, though it will also link in through their profile. We will look at this in detail now. The following screenshot shows the student's view of the above settings when initiated: Once these settings under modules and blocks have been saved, staff can now create targets and modify reports, and students can get an overview of their work and learning, as we will see now. Creating targets The first task is to add some targets to your course for your students. The block will link to the area that displays the students so that you can see the targets, but the targets are added as activities. Switch on the edit function and choose a target for a section of your course where it is appropriate. This will be under the activities drop-down menu. The target requires a basic name and a summary of what it is for, as with all other activities. Once it is set, you can then make more specific targets for each student in the group by clicking on the target link from the front of the course. The following screenshot shows the target named Research Skills that we have created: Clicking on this link will open up a menu for all of your students. For each student, there is a link for targets and here you can add or modify targets for the students. Here you can see that a target has been set with a deadline of one month after it is set. You can add comments as it progresses, and the drop-down menu allows you to modify it so that it is either achieved (in which case when, or withdrawn as not achievable). The targets themselves can be general targets that need to be achieved across the range of the student's learning, or they can be tied specifically to a course by checking the Course related option checkbox, as shown in the following screenshot: You can also see that we have the option to tie it to courses that the student is taking. If you are a personal tutor, you can work across the subject range and apply a number of targets. All of these can have a specified deadline. You now need to allow students to see their plans. Accessing personal plans As a teacher, you need to switch on editing for your course. This makes the block visible on the bottom-right margin of your course (assuming that is where you added the block). Choose the Personal Learning Plan block. This will then be added to your course and can be moved to where it is most suited to your layout. The preceding screenshot is the view that you will see as a teacher and will allow you to see and comment on a student's targets and reports as needed, as well as export those reports. The students will have a more restricted view, as shown in the following screenshot: When students will click on the link My PLP, it will open the interface showing them their personal settings as well as any targets, concerns, or reports related to them. The more settings you have enabled on the admin section, the more they will see, so it is down to decide what information they can access. In this case, the student will be able to add some details about themselves for you and their class, but also see how they are faring in terms of targets. This can be used for tutorial sessions so that they can work on improving areas of perceived strengths or weaknesses. In terms of the targets that are set, they can interact with staff through comments so that a clear dialog can be established and hopefully issues can be picked up on as soon as possible. Once you hav e added various targets and worked with students through their concerns and those of other staff, you can then pull it all together through a report. The report can then be used to show their skills and aptitudes in their individual design areas and may show that they have a preference and an aptitude in one area such as resistant materials but not in food. This information can be used to provide clearer information for the students in the courses you design and the examples you use. Summary This article introduced you to a Personal Learning module which allows you and your students to set and evaluate targets and personal goals. This module will help your students reflect on their work and allow you to better guide them in their ideas and practices. Further resources on this subject: Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques [book] Moodle 1.9 Math [book] Moodle 1.9: Exploring Design Portfolios [article] Testing Students' Knowledge using Moodle Modules [article] Managing Student Work using Moodle: Part 1 [article] Managing Student Work using Moodle: Part 2 [article] Managing Student Work using Moodle: Part 3 [article]

(For more resources on Moodle 1.9, see here.) Exploring the Exabis portfolio The Exabis portfolio is a third-party add-on that can be placed in your courses to allow students to store and organize their work and allow them to share it with others, for example, external verifiers. The code can be downloaded from the Modules and plugins section at the Moodle website (http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=1142&filter=1). Once the code has been installed, the site administrator will need to check the settings of the block for all users. Site-wide settings The first job, for an administrator, is to make sure the settings meet the institution's needs. These settings are available on the administration panel. You may need your site administrator to adjust these for you if you do not have these permissions. The following screenshot shows the two options available: The settings will be determined by what version you have installed on your system, and in this case, the options relate to how the portfolio looks. The key feature of recent portfolios is the ability to create views that are customized web pages. Most students will be familiar with this activity through social networking sites. Installing the Exabis block into a course To use the Exabis block, you first need to enable editing within the course you are responsible for. To do this, you need to click on the Turn editing on button, as shown in the following screenshot: This will change the view of your course, and a block will now be visible on the right-hand column to add further blocks to your course. The Add button, as shown in the previous screenshot, is a drop-down list and will list all available blocks in alphabetical order. You need to scroll down until you find the Exabis E-Portfolio listing and then click to add this block. Once the block has been added to your course area, you can make some more localized adjustments. In the staff view, there are three options. However, the two lower options merely point to different tabs on the same menu as the MyPortfolio link. Once you open the portfolio, you can see the layout of the block and the functions that it supports, as shown in the following screenshot: The personal information tab The first tab allows students to build up some personal information so that they have a sort of limited resume or CV. Once students click on the Information tab, they will see one button (Edit), which will open an edit window to allow them to add some notes and details. The Categories tab After students have entered some basic information about themselves, they need to organize their material. This is achieved initially by establishing some categories under which the information they gather can be structured. In this example, using the Product Design course, the student may need to create categories for each section they are working with. In the UK, for example, this would be: Materials and Components, Design and Market Influence, and Process and Manufacture. By clicking on the Categories tab, there will, as with the Information tab, be an edit button visible. Clicking on this button will open a window to create the required categories, as shown in the following screenshot: By clicking on the New button, as shown in the previous screenshot, the category will be created and you will then have the choice to add sub-categories or new categories as required. The layout of this edit window is as shown in the following screenshot: These can be further broken down into sub-categories that match the course specification. The process is the same as creating categories, and with each new category created, an additional field appears to add sub-categories, as seen in the previous screenshot. The resulting structure could look similar to the following screenshot, where each part of the specification has a corresponding category and sub-category. These categories will now be available in drop-down menus for the students to add various resources, such as files and notes, as shown in the following screenshot: In the previous screenshot, you can see that students have a drop-down box under Categories, which lists categories and sub-categories for them to link their resources too. Building up the portfolio content Students can now build up their portfolio of evidence and can share this information, if they need to, with staff, other students, or external examiners. The information is organized through the main My Portfolio tab, as shown in the following screenshot: Under this tab, there are sub-tabs that allow the students to link to websites, upload files, and also make notes about some of the material they have gathered. Each of these can now be associated with a category or sub-category to give some clear definition to their research work. The following screenshot shows a student adding some files to a sub-category related to design: In the previous screenshot, students could attach a file which may be some notes they made on a factory visit that they have scanned. Gradually, they can start building up a detailed folder of information and links to other useful resources. The following screenshot shows the MyPortfolio view as a student builds up some of their reference material and notes. Each of the resources is clearly categorized and time stamped and the type of resources is easy to see. Creating views In the release under discussion here (version 3.2.3 release 168) there is a tab to create views. This is still under development and not fully functional, but may well be functional by the time you install it. Clicking on the Views tab will show a button to add a view. Clicking on the Add View button will open an edit window to allow the student to organize their views, as shown in the following screenshot: The views are quite basic at present, but will allow students to build up a portfolio of evidence in an easy and organized way. Sharing their work and thoughts If students would like to share some of their work with each other, then they can via the Views tab. This tab, on the latest version, has a link to allow sharing. Once students enable the sharing function by clicking on the Change link, they can then choose what type of sharing they require and with whom. In the case shown here, the student can elect to share his/her work externally by creating a link to his/her folder from an external or an internal link. The Internal Access option allows them to further specify who can see their portfolio. In this case, they can share it with all of the staff who teach them in the design and technology faculty, or just some of the staff. In this case, when the product design teacher logs in and checks for shared portfolios, they will see this student's work. Importing and exporting portfolios Increasingly with e-portfolios there is the need to be able to take the entire portfolio with the students to other places of study or work. With the Exabis system, there is the ability to export the student's work in a number of formats. The two formats, currently available are Shareable Content Object Reference Module (SCORM) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). Both of these are file structures used to import and export groups of files from web-based systems such as Moodle. The import facility in Exabis will import a SCORM file, which is usually in a zipped format. The options shown for Export/Import are shown in the following screenshot: In both cases shown here, the export will allow students to save their work as a ZIP file, and depending on how they have structured their portfolio, they will have a range of choices regarding what to include in the export. The following screenshot shows the options for a SCORM export. The student, as shown in the previous screenshot, has chosen to save his/her Product Development material in a SCORM file. Clicking on the Create SCORM-File button will open a download dialog window where the student can chose where on his/her computer to save the zipped file. An additional feature shown in the previous Export your portfolio screenshot is the ability to include Moodle assignments in the portfolio of evidence. This would be useful if students take the portfolio to a new job. Clicking on the Import from Moodle-Assignments link results in a screen where students can add their assignments, as shown in the following screenshot: Under the Action column shown in this screenshot, the student can click on the add this file link. Clicking this link will open the MyPortfolio:Add window and the student can link this assignment to a category. The resulting link will then appear in their MyPortfolio: Files view. The assignment itself will be a hyperlink, which will open the word-processed assignment when clicked. Opening the assignment link will create a full URL to where the assignment can be located so that external examiners or employers can also view the work. It allows additional notes to be added by the student, such as follow up comments, as shown in the following screenshot: The additional commentary shows how the student has used the portfolio to track their learning process and to reflect on their earlier work. The whole process is therefore contained in an organized structure that the student controls and can be modified as their greater understanding dictates. Future developments in Exabis As mentioned, the views in this portfolio are not yet fully developed, but the current version is very usable. In order to have more flexibility and functionality, it is necessary to install a more fully featured e-portfolio such as MyStuff, which we will investigate in the next section.

As a freelancer I have one primitive motive. I want to do work and get paid. Getting paid means I need to generate invoices and keep track of them. I've tried to manage my invoices via spreadsheets and documents, but keeping track of my payments in a series of disconnected files is a fragile and inefficient process. Simple Invoices provides a solution to this. Simple Invoices is a relatively young project, and working with it requires that you're willing to do some manual configurations and tolerate the occasional problem. To work with and install the application, you need to be familiar with running a web server on OS X, Windows, or Linux. The next section, Web Server Required provides some out of the box server packages that allow you to run a server environment on your personal computer. It's point and click easy and perfect for an individual user. Not up for running a web server, but still need to find a reliable invoicing application? No problem. Visit www.simpleinvoices.com for a list of hosted solutions. Let's get started. Web Server Required Simple Invoices is a web application that requires Apache, PHP, and MySQL to function. Even if you're not a system administrator, you can still run a web server on your computer, regardless of your operating system. Windows users can get the required software by installing WAMP from www.wampserver.com. OS X users can install MAMP from www.mamp.info. Linux users can install Apache, MySql, and PHP5 using their distribution's software repositories. The database administrative tool, phpMyAdmin makes managing the MySQL database intuitive. Both the WAMP and MAMP installers contain phpMyAdmin, and we'll use it to setup our databases. Take a moment to setup your web server before continuing with the Simple Invoices installation. Install Simple Invoices Our first step will be to prepare the MySQL database. Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost/phpmyadmin. Replace localhost with the actual server address. A login screen will display and will prompt you for a user name and password. Enter the the root login information for your MySQL install. MAMP users might try root for both the user name and password. WAMP users might try root with no password. If you plan on keeping your WAMP or MAMP servers installed, setting new root passwords for your MySQL database is a good idea, even if you do not allow external connections to your server. After you log in to phpMyAdmin, you will see a list of databases on the left sidebar; the main content window displays a set of tabs, including Databases, SQL, and Status. Let's create the database. Click on the Privileges tab to display a list of all users and associated access permissions. Find the Add a New User link and click on it. The Add New User page displays. Complete the following fields: User Name: enter simpleinvoices Host: select Local Password: specify a password for the user; then retype it in the field provided Database for User: select the Create database with same name and grant all privileges option Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Go button. This procedure creates the database user and the database at the same time. If you wanted to use a database name that was different than the user name, then could have selected None for the Database for user configuration and added the database manually via the Databases tab in phpMyAdmin. If you prefer to work with MySQL directly, the SQL code for the steps we just ran is (the *** in the first line is the password): CREATE USER 'simpleinvoices'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '***'; GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'simpleinvoices'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '***' WITH MAX_QUERIES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_CONNECTIONS_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_UPDATES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 0;CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `simpleinvoices`; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `simpleinvoices`.* TO 'simpleinvoices'@'localhost'; Now that the database is setup, let's download the stable version of Simple Invoices by visiting www.simpleinvoices.org and following the Download link. The versions are identified by the year and version. At the time of this writing, the stable version is 2010.1. Unzip the Simple Invoices download file into a subdirectory on your web server. Because I like to install a lot of software, I like to keep the application name in my directory structure, so my example installation installs to a directory named simpleinvoices. That makes my installation available at http://localhost/simpleinvoices. Pick a directory path that makes sense for you. Not sure where the root of your web server resides on your server? Here are some of the default locations for the various server environments: WAMP – C:wampwww MAMP – /Applications/MAMP/htdocs Linux – /var/www Linux users will need to set the ownership of the tmp directory to the web user and make the tmp directory writable. For an Ubuntu system, the appropriate commands are: chown -R www-data tmpchmod -R 775 tmp The command syntax assumes we're working from the Simple Invoices installation directory on the web server. The web user on Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems is www-data. The -R option in both commands applies the permissions to all sub-directories and files. With the chmod command, you are granting write access to the web user. If you have problems or feel like being less secure, you can reduce this step down to one command: chmod -R 777 tmp. We're almost ready to open the Simple Invoices installer, but before we go to the web browser, we need to define the database connections in the config/config.ini file. At a minimum, we need to specify the database.params.username and database.params.password with the values we used to setup the database. If you skip this step and try to open Simple Invoices in your web browser, you will receive an error message indicating that your config.ini settings are incorrect. The following screenshot shows the relevant settings in confi.ini. Now, we're ready to start Simple Invoices and step through the graphical installer. Open a web browser and navigate to your installation (for example: http://localhost/simpleinvoices). Step 1: Install Database will display in the browser. Review the database connection information and click the Install Database button. Step 2: Import essential data displays. Click the Install Essential Data button to advance the installation. Step 3: Import sample data displays. We can choose to import sample data or start using the application. The sample data contains a few example billers, customers, and invoices. We're going to set all that up from scratch, so I recommend you click the Start using Simple Invoices button. At this point the Simple Invoices dashboard displays with a yellow note that instructs us to configure a biller, a customer, and a product before we create our first invoice. See the following screenshot. You might notice that the default access to Simple Invoices is not protected by a username and password. We can force authentication by adding a user and password via the People > Users screen. Then set the authentication.enabled field in config.ini equal to true.

So let's crack on... Creating a new theme Finding a base theme to create your Moodle theme on is the first thing that you need to do.There are, however, various ways to do this; you can make a copy of the standard themeand rename it as you did in part of this article, or you can use a parent theme that isalso based on the standard theme. The important point here is that the standard theme that comes with Moodle is the cornerstone of the Moodle theming process. Every other Moodle theme should be based upon this theme, and would normally describe the differences from the standard theme. Although this method does work and is a simple way to get started with Moodle theming, it does cause problems as new features could get added to Moodle that might cause your theme to display or function incorrectly. The standard theme will always be updated before a new release of Moodle is launched. So if you do choose to make a copy of the standard theme and change its styles, it would be best to make sure that you use a parent theme as well. In this way, the parent theme will be your base theme along with the changes that you make to your copy of the standard theme. However, there is another way of creating your first theme, and that is to create a copy of a theme that is very close to the standard theme, such as standardwhite, and use this as your theme. Moodle will then use the standard theme as its base theme and apply any changes that you make to the standardwhite theme on the top (parent). All we are doing is describing the differences between the standard and the standardwhite themes. This is better because Moodle developers will sometimes make changes to the standard theme to be up-to-date with new Moodle features. This means that on each Moodle update, your standard theme, folder will be updated automatically, thus avoiding any nasty display problems being caused by Moodle updates. The way by which you configure Moodle themes is completely up to you. If you see a theme that is nearly what you want and there aren't really many changes needed, then using a parent theme makes sense, as most of the styles that you require have already been written. However, if you want to create a theme that is completely different from any other theme or wish to really get into Moodle theming, then using a copy of one of the standard sheets would be best. So let's get on and see what the differences are when using different theme setups, and see what effect these different methods have on the theming process. Time for action – copying the standard theme Browse to your theme folder in C:Program FilesApache Software FoundationApache 2.2htdocstheme. Copy the standard theme by right-clicking on the theme's folder and choosing Copy. Paste the copied theme into the theme directory (the same directory that you arecurrently in). Rename the copy of standard folder to blackandblue or any other name that you wish to choose (remember not to use capitals or spaces). Open your Moodle site and navigate to Site Administration Appearance | Themes | Theme Selector|, and choose the blackandblue theme that you have just created. Y ou might have noticed that the theme shown in the preceding screenshot has a header that says Black and Blue theme. This is because I have added this to the Full site name in the Front Page settings page. Time for action – setting a parent theme Open your web browser and navigate to your Moodle site and log in as the administrator. Go to Site Administration | Appearance | Themes | Theme Selector and choose your blackandblue theme if it is not already selected. Browse to the root of your blackandblue folder, right-click on the config.php file, and choose Open with | WordPad. You need to make four changes to this file so that you can use this theme and a parent theme while ensuring that you still use the default standard theme as your base. Here are the changes: $THEME->sheets = array('user_styles');$THEME->standardsheets = true;$THEME->parent = 'autumn';$THEME->parentsheets = array('styles'); Let's look at each of these statements, in turn. $THEME->sheets = array('user_styles'); This contains the names of all of the stylesheet files that you want to include in this for your blackandblue theme, namely user_styles. $THEME->standardsheets = true; This parameter is used to include the standard theme's stylesheets. If it is set to True, it will use all of the stylesheets in the standard theme. Alternatively, it can be set as an array in order to load individual stylesheets in whatever order is required. We have set this to True, so we will use all of the stylesheets of the standard theme. $THEME->parent = 'autumn'; This variable can be set to use a theme as the parent theme, which is included before the current theme. This will make it easier to make changes to another theme without having to change the actual files. $THEME->parentsheets = array('styles'); This variable can be used to choose either all of the parent theme's stylesheets or individual files. It has been set to include the styles.css file from the parent theme, namely autumn. Because there is only one stylesheet in the Autumn theme, you can set this variable to True. Either way, you will have the same outcome. Save themeblackandblueconfig.php, and refresh your web browser window. You should see something similar to the following screenshot. Note that your blocks may be different to the ones below, but you can ignore this. What just happened? Okay, so now you have a copy of the standard theme that uses the Autumn theme (by Patrick Malley) as its parent. You might have noticed that the header isn't correct and that the proper Autumn theme header isn't showing. Well, this is because you are essentially using the copy of the standard theme and that the header from this theme is the one that you see above. It's only the CSS files that are included in this hierarchy, so any HTML changes will not be seen until you edit your standard theme's header.html file. Have a go hero – choose another parent theme Go back and have a look through some of the themes on Moodle.org and download one that you like. Add this theme as a parent theme to your blackandblue theme's config.php file, but this time choose which stylesheets you want to use from that theme. The Back to School theme is a good one for this exercise, as its stylesheets are clearly labeled. So you Copying the header and footer files To show that you are using the Autumn theme's CSS files and the standard theme's HTML files, you can just go and copy the header.html and footer.html files from Patrick Malley's Autumn theme and paste them into your blackandblue theme's folder. Don't worry about overwriting your header and footer files, as you can always just copy them again from the ac tual standard theme folder. Time for action – copying the header.html and footer.html files Browse to the Autumn theme's folder and highlight both the header.html and footer.html files by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on them both. Right-click on the selected files and choose Copy. Browse to your blackandblue theme's folder and right-click and choose Paste. Go back to your browser window and press the F5 button to refresh the page. You will now see the full Autumn theme. What just happened? You have copied the autumn theme's header.html and footer.html files into your blackandblue theme, so you can see the full autumn theme working. You probably will not actually use the header.html and footer.html files that you just copied, as this was just an example of how the Moodle theming process works. So you now have an unmodified copy of the standard theme called blackandblue, which is using the autumn theme as its parent theme. All you need to do now to make changes to this theme is to edit your CSS file in the blackandblue theme folder. Theme folder housework However, there are a couple of things that you need to do first, as you have an exact copy of the standard theme apart from the header.html and footer.html files. This copied folder has files that you do not need, as the only file that you set for your theme to use was the user_styles.css file in the config.php file earlier. This was the first change that you made: $THEME->sheets = array('user_styles'); The user_style.css file does not exist in your blackandblue theme's folder, so you will need to create it. You will also need to delete any other CSS files that are present, as your new blackandblue theme will use only one stylesheet, namely the user_styles.css file that you will be creating in the following sections. Time for action – creating our stylesheet Right-click anywhere in your blackandblue folder and choose New Text Document|. Rename this text document to user_styles.css by right-clicking again and choosing Rename. Time for action – deleting CSS files that we don't need Delete the following CSS files by selecting them and then right-clicking on the selected files and choosing Delete. styles_color.css styles_ie6.css styles_ie6.css styles_ie7.css styles_layout.css styles_moz.css {background: #000000;} What just happened? In the last two tasks, you created an empty CSS file called user_style.css in your blackandblue theme's folder. You then deleted all of the CSS files in your blackandblue theme's folder, as you will no longer need them. Remember, these are just copies of the CSS files in the standard theme folder and you have set your theme to use the standard theme as its base in the blackandblue theme's config.php file. Let's make some changes Now you have set up your theme the way that you want it, that is, you are using your own blackandblue theme by using the standard theme as a base and the Autumn theme as the parent. Move on and make a few changes to your user_style.css file so that you can see what effect this has on your theme, and check that all of your config.php file's settings are correct. Remember that all of the current styles are being inherited from the Autumn theme. Time for action – checking our setup Open up your Moodle site with the current theme (which should be blackandblue but looks like the Autumn theme). Navigate to your blackandblue theme's folder, right-click on the user_style.css file, and choose Open. This file should be completely blank. Type in the following line of CSS for the body element, and then save the fi le: body {background: #000000;} Now refresh your browser window. You will see that the background is now black. Note: When using Firebug to identify styles that are being used, it might not always be obvious where they are or which style is controlling that element of the page. An example of this is the body {background: #000000;}code that we just pasted in our user_style.css file. If we had used Firebug to indentify that style, we would not have found it. Instead, I just took a look at the CSS file from the autumn theme. What I am trying to say here is that there will always be an element of poking around and trial and error. What just happened? All seems fine there, doesn't it? You have added one style declaration to your empty user_style.css file to change the background color, and have checked the changes in your browser. You now know how the parent themes work and know that you only need to copy the styles from Firebug into your user_style.css file and edit the style declarations that need to be changed.