Sept saw the launch of #MoodleBrighton, a monthly meetup for Moodlers in Brighton & Hove. At last year’s UK and Ireland MoodleMoot in Dublin I met some of the guys from the Sussex University eLearning Team and we hatched a plan to start up a monthly event in Brighton. It took a while but this was the first such one, and is set for the first Thursday of every month at The Skiff in Gloucester Road, Brighton. The Skiff is a freelancer hub and provides space for regular software group meetups, as this is an open source event they donated the space for free every month, for which we are really grateful. Thanks @theskiff!
I attended and presented at my first iMoot last week. For the uninitiated, Moodle Moots are regional conferences and the annual iMoot is a 4 day online conference extravaganza with round the clock sessions! I did two sessions on building and deploying mobile learning for Moodle which you can view on Slideshare.
Day Three at the Moodle Moot started with a sore head! The previous night saw a drinks reception hosted by Remote Learner (thankyou for the wine!) followed by an excellent Gala dinner with good food, nice wine and great company. I headed off at 10pm but the tweets and video footage continued into the small hours so this morning started with sore heads all round!
So today was my induction into the world of Moodle Moots. Despite working in Moodle for the last four years this is the first time I’ve managed to attend the annual UK Moot and today was thoroughly enjoyable. I missed the keynote from Martin Dougiamas as I was in the air at the time but arrive for the start of the first session at about 11am.
We should see native support for multi-tenancy in Moodle 2.3 which is due out in June and I’m keen to see how this will work. UPDATE 19/03: thanks to Gavin Henrick and Tim Hunt who pointed out that this feature was dropped from the Moodle 2.3 roadmap last month. I have removed a few references this release below.
A few months ago I came across this excellent post over on Dan Poltawski’s blog: Multi-tenant Moodle without the 2.2 feature where he expands on the multi-tenancy Moodle setup they have at LUNS which scales to over 1,000 Moodle sites from a single codebase. I think this method will be hard to beat but we shall see with the release of 2.3.
December sees the release of Moodle 2.2 which is now under code freeze and being put through the rigours of the Moodle QA process to iron out those last niggling issues prior to official launch. The beta is already available on the Moodle Downloads page and the team are encouraging people to download and test it and feed back any issues found.
