I’ve been working with Moodle for several years now, primarily as part of the SLOODLE project. However, one thing that has always been a source of frustration is how slow Moodle often seems on my local Windows Vista PC in the office. (Sadly, I don’t have the option of upgrading to Win7.) As it turns out, the performance problem was entirely caused by where I had placed my “moodledata” folder, and there is an easy solution.
Read more moodledata location affects Moodle performance
Due to a recent computer catastrophe, I had to re-install Windows 7 from scratch. Afterwards though, I couldn’t get Apache to start. I was previously working on a system which had been upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows 7 so something was different about the clean installation. Read more WWWPS stops Apache starting on Win 7
I encountered a frustrating problem regarding HTTP content type headers today. It massively broke the design of my site in Firefox, but didn’t seem to affect anything in Internet Explorer. The lesson learned is to be careful where you set the Content-Type header in PHP. Read more PHP gotcha: Content-Type matters!
You will sometimes want to generate a suitable URL ‘slug’ based on something the user has entered, such as the name of a blog post, or perhaps the name of a file which is being uploaded.
In order to ensure that your URLs are consistent, valid, and unambiguous, it is common to restrict the slug to ASCII letters (lower-case only), numbers, and dashes (-). For example, a blog post called “Hello World!” might have a resulting slug of “hello-world”. Additionally, it is common to remove leading and trailing dashes from the final slug.
In this post, I’ll introduce a way of doing this in pure JavaScript. Read more Making slugs with JavaScript and regular expressions
Some compatibility problems were reported following the release of SLOODLE 1.0, and they largely appear to centre around the object-oriented plugin system I developed for the Presenter module. The idea is fairly simple. The SLOODLE core team or 3rd party developers can create plugin classes to extend the module’s functionality. These will all belong to a structured inheritance hierarchy, and will be automatically detected and loaded by the SLOODLE framework. However, it has been a big challenge maintaining compatibility for both PHP4 and PHP5 because the object orientated features of the language have changed so much in that time.
I think I’ve finally found the solution, and it’s infuriatingly inelegant. Read more PHP4/5: Object orientation and compatibility
I’ve been wrestling with many compatibility quirks in SLOODLE lately, and this one certainly takes the prize. It seems that some perfectly valid shell commands will simply not work when executed from within PHP on Windows. Read more PHP quirk: shell commands breaking on Windows