Moodle

Assigning to Martin for his consideration and adding some watchers... I'm not expert in English but agree that "optional subsystems" is, perhaps, too much technical (although, in the other side, admins should be relatively techs).

Hi Eloy,

Thanks.

That's an interesting assumption. In my experience site administrators are increasingly non-technical - either system admins or programmers. It will beinteresting to have the opinions of others on this.

I think that's a bit too general ...really the whole admin menu is "system options" ...

Another idea that may work was "Optional features" though that was rejected as of course we have many other features not in that page ...

System options: Agreed, that's just the best I've come up with yet . It will be tricky for the reason stated but almost anything will be better than the current term. Will keep thinking.

It is just me, or are you forgetting who your audience is? It's not a technical issue - it's about persuading people who are very knew to Moodle administration to stay away isn't it? Stuff about optional subsystems and the like carries no weight.

Whatever developers might like to think, a lot of people doing Moodle admin have it foisted upon them and they don not really have the skills. They need all the help (and warning where appropriate) that they can possibly get. The phrase also needs to translate reasonably easily. That's why I thought "advanced" although not strictly accurate, granted, carried the right feeling.

You think "optional features" is too technical?

For me the issue with "advanced" is that these feature aren't really more "advanced" than many others e.g. Enable RSS feeds, Blog visibility.

I know, "advanced" is a terrible word, but my point is that it carries the right weight. "optional subsystems" or (worse) "system options" mean absolutely nothing at all... a name designed by committee More than that, I would try and wedge an additional screen/message in somewhere that actually explains what it means when you enable these features. If you feel you are not advanced then "advanced features" means "not for you".

At the risk of stating the obvious, to get this bit wrong renders the whole exercise pointless. Don't think me rude, but you are all overthinking this.

Another thought.... has somebody written a paragraph that defines what these optional/advanced features are "defined" as. Maybe the name will fall out of that?

I second Howard about "advanced". This term, while may not be technically accurate, has the right usability for the purpose. Some of the people discussing this seem to focus too much of what it means to them in terms of what those features really are. However, the idea of this new tab, as far as I understand it, is to keep some potentially "dangerous" features somewhat away from less advanced admins. "Advanced" will achieve that, I believe. Anything optional won't.

Hmm, no they aren't necessarily dangerous things ... they are just "big" features that people may or may not want, gathered together on one page to make it easy to enable/disable them. Here are the current ones, I guess this list will grow.

Groupings
Outcomes
Tags
Notes
Portfolios
Messaging
Statistics
RSS
Blogs
Networking

I think we do need to use the word "features". I'd be OK with "Advanced features". Any more votes for this or other ideas?

I hadn't fired up Moodle 2.0 for a while, and now I see what it looks like I see where everybody is coming from. I'm still not completely convinced of it's purpose though. I thought it was to steer people away from all that stuff that they can use to screw up their site, but it isn't really. This makes me think even more that warnings like those on some of the module/filter pages "don't change this unless you know what you are doing!!" should be applied to further pages.

May be we need two new tabs, optional features and advanced features.

I noticed on the screenshot that some options have an explanation of the reason you might want to change them, but others don't. e.g. "If you enable this you will see some interesting graphs and statics" is really useful if you are unsure, but "This setting enables groupings of groups" doesn't really tell me why I would want to alter this or leave it alone. It would also help to know where to go next if you want to use this feature e.g. Admin block->reports->statistics. Also the worst case scenario if I muck around with it.

I would say 'Advanced features' is good. 'Enable/Disable advanced features' would be my vote.

I've changed it in HEAD to "Advanced features" (enable/disable is just too long)