An October Update

I’ve just put up an updated version.  Here it is:

Moodle 2.3   [download id=”30″ ]

Moodle 2.1/2.2   [download id=”31″ ]

It’s mostly for power PoodLL’ers, but please read on regardless. I am sure you will like some of the updates.

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• A new PoodLL data directory
• Several new, and resurrected, widgets
• Speed improvements
• More reliable Flowplayer integration

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And there is a whole new module, the PoodLL Database Activity Field.  I know some of you will be saying “Hey uh, whats that?” So let me go through all the updates, starting with the new module and explain them.

The PoodLL Database Activity Field

Moodle has a cool database activity that allows you to design simple data applications right within Moodle. You design a a form for adding information, and display templates for displaying that information. Moodle handles all the tricky stuff, including searching and sorting. If you have ever used the Moodle plugins directory to download themes or filters or question types, then you used the database activity.

The PoodLL database activity field allows you to add multimedia input fields to a database. So students or teachers can post video, audio , snapshots or drawings in their entries. Over on the PoodLL demo site, there is a simple self introductions database, starring, ahem, me. See that activity here. (You will need to login to post). Also it is a separate download, not included in the main download. (This is because you need to add two language strings to a file outside of the mod itself. Check the “read me” file once you have downloaded. Hopefully Moodle will fix that up soon.)

Download for Moodle 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3   [download id=”32″ ]

The PoodLL Data Directory

This defaults to a directory called “poodlldata” under the root of your moodle installation. PoodLL doesn’t create this folder or manage it in any way. It is just a convenience for those who want to be able to use the video galleries, and audio list players and talkback widget. In most cases you will simply FTP your xml and media files in there and manage them via FTP. This is the power PoodLL’er stuff I was talking about. So if you want to use this, you will need at least that level of technical skill and access rights to the server.

The New Widgets

We have made it possible to use some of the old widgets that people liked from Moodle 1.9 days, via the new PoodLL data directory. This includes the talkback widget, and the big and small video galleries. The widgets themselves have not been altered, so the previous configurations will work. You can see  a demo of the talkback widget here.  A demo of the audio list players pulling data from the poodlldata folder is here. I will fix up a few more demos and explain them better shortly.

I am a bit worried about exposing this next PoodLL function on our tokyo.poodll.com server, but here goes … We have also enabled some of the Red5 live streaming features. This is the same  technology that powers our audio/video pairs(not released yet). You can see the webcam broadcast and subscribe widgets on this page. If you look in edit mode, you will see how a unique key binds them together. Using this you can beam remote teachers into your moodle course, or other fancy stuff.  Almost no setup or tech. knowledge required. Cool eh.

For now just check each of those pages in edit view to see how we made them. Remember the admin login for the demo site is

username:  admin

password: googlepoodll

 Flowplayer Integration

The flowplayer has been the default audio and video player in PoodLL for Moodle 2. It works very well, is highly configurable and is licensed under the GPL (thats important in the Moodle world). But its been causing a few headaches sometimes conflicting with the Multimedia Plugins filter and occasionally resizing and endlessly looping.  We have been able to fix all of that up now. To that end, we added a number of flowplayer settings in the PoodLL filter settings page. One of them is purely cosmetic, you can change the default color (blue) to another color. The most important setting sets the embedding method to use “SWF Object.”  In most cases this will be fine. If however you do run into difficulties you can alternatively select “Flowplayer JS.”

I hope you can use some of these things. Please try them out on http://demo.poodll.com . Let me know how you find them.