Moodle

Hi,

Does this mean that you don't intend to mirror the site wide blog visibility i.e. for courses and groups, or to not display if the global settng allows for viewing one's own blog entries?

If not then the course and group global settngs are redundant as this info will be available for anyone.

If it can't be implemented in full it can't be in core (imo)

Example troublesome scenario:

Site set up for blog visibility at course level.
Courses include a blogging activity
Clients from competing companies are participating in separate courses - contact between participants in different companies is not desirable
All blog entries are visible to any user on site.

Hi,

We will endeavour to make the display of activity consistent with the normal blog visibility rules, but given the work required to make other MyMoodle features ready to offer back to core, it may not be possible to code this, and therefore the blog overview function may have to be omitted completely from what we contribute back. At this time, I'll keep the sub-task open in case we do get time to amend it.

Many thanks for the update. I'll watch this issue.

I've been working on this today, and I've got the code so that it checks if the admin set blog level is "site" or "global", and only returns results in those cases.

If the blog level is user, or disabled, then the function is redundant as there's no-one else's blogging that you're allowed to see anyway.

What worries me, is what to do about blog level course and group. I can't quite work out what's going on here. If its set to course, you should be able to see the blogs of other people on your course, I think? But what you actually see on blog/index.php is the blogs of people who've set the entry to "all on the site". When you create an entry, there doesn't seem to be a matching "only on my course" setting. I'm confused.

Would it make sense for course and group to return the site-visible blogs? Or should I return nothing?

Unless some-one can explain this to me (or I have a revelation overnight), I'm going to offer the patch as is and let some-one who does understand extend it.

Or - Martin?? - if it doesn't cater for course and group level access, is it pointless to commit?

If its set to course, you should only be able to see the blogs of other people who share courses with you. The publish setting per-entry "Anyone on this site" is a bit misleading, but it just means "publish" as opposed to private draft copies. The bloglevel is about the VIEWER context, not who the AUTHOR thinks they want to publish it to. The POV here is that blogs are personal, and people are just blogging about their own experiences, but admins may want to limit how far those blogs are published.

It's entirely possible a bloglevel of "course" has regressed for main blog display (there were recent changes in 1.9), someone needs to check that out.

Thanks Martin. I've done some playing today and confirmed that the main blog display is still working correctly when bloglevel is set to course or group.

And I've even worked out a way of counting only the blog posts that you should see on myMoodle if its set to course. Basically if the admin bloglevel setting is site or global, then all blogs are counted and reported in the site level section of myMoodle. If the bloglevel setting is course, then blogs are counted on a course by course basis and reported for each course.

The problem here is that if you share multiple courses with some-one, their 1 blog post could appear on your myMoodle page multiple times, because the post isn't assigned to a particular course.

The attached patch goes this far. And it may be as far as it is sensible to go here. I'll explain why...

When you look at the course home page if bloglevel=group, the blog block does not display a link to view blogs, so including it in myMoodle might be inconsistent. More importantly, a user could be in more than 1 group for a course and so you'd need "Y blogs for group x", "Z blogs for group a" which I think would look nasty. I can do it, I just don't think its going to look good or consistent.

I'll leave it with you for review now. Let me know if you want me to work on it further.

updated patch attached to http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-13583