July 22, 2006
Moodle Gripes #2
...or maybe #2 and #3?
An increasing number of courses are looking at embedding audio snippets into course materials. So just out of curiousity, I wondered whether the VLE Demo had embedded media filters enabled, that scan a page for media links (mp3, for example) and make them inline playable. From a quick test, it seems they are enabled (a flash player definitely is pulled in to the page) but broken (for me at least):
Ah well, maybe it's my browser not playing - can I get the delioious playtagger to work (it's the same principle, search for mp3s and bring an embedded Flash player into the page to play them):
So it's the Moodle player embedding code appears to be broken... (I could try and find out why, but hey - not my job;-) Maybe someone else will fix it some time..? Anyway, here's the gripe - and it's one I've come across before...
If you put a script in a Moodle edited web page that manipulates the DOM and adds stuff to the page (like the play button image that the delicious script inserted), when you edit the page it is loaded into a WYSIWYG page editor...which runs the script, and manipulates the page in the context of the editor; so now the code for the image is part of the document being edited, and if you save the page, that code will be saved too. Meaning that the next time you run the page you will have two images; one from the code that was inserted by the WYSIWYG editor, one that is dynamically added when the page loads and the script runs.
Each time you edit the page, another element is added:
So this is my Moodle gripe #2: the page editor defaults to WYSIWYG and runs any scripts you have in the page being editied.
So I wonder - is there any way of either setting a preference for the editor so that by default it shows the code view, or that disables the rich text editor altogether (I never use it, personally - I'd rather write the HTML tags myself).
PS for internal readers, I'm trying all sorts of embeddable stuff out in Moodle at VLE Library Demo. I've also opened it up to guests who have a key - mail me if you want the key...
Posted by ajh59 at July 22, 2006 01:41 PM