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Moodle

Moodle Blog limitations

The blog functionality in Moodle is fairly basic.

That said, with the advances in Moodle and the mobile responsive Themes, I am quite happily writing this post on my iPhone while drinking coffee and sitting on the sea front in Paihia.

i remember when the blog activity in Moodle was first discussed at aMoodle Moot in New Zealand, with Dan Marsden canvassing ideas and feedback for the code he was developing.

Although the blog functionality has been developed and refined over various Moodle releases, perhaps the most obvious missing feature, when attempting to use Moodle as a blogging environment, as with this site, is the inability for Guests to leave comments.  Others may argue the inability to list entries by date, á la WordPress is it’s biggest missing feature?

Of course this lack of comments isn’t a problem with the blog module, it’s just following the underlying architecture of Moodle in not allowing Guests to add data, with good reason.

The plugin blog module from the UK Open University does allow comments, and these are emailed to the original post creator for approval.  And although the OU can live alongside the core blog functionality in Moodle, it’s not integrated.  So there’s no search facility, unless you also install the OU Search plugin.

Maybe the ability for Guests to add Comments to blog posts will appear in the future, and I might add this as a Feature Request to the Moodle Tracker.

Stuart Mealor
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Stuart Mealor

Stuart is interested in all things e-learning, with specific interests in Moodle, e-learning strategy, and business development. His experience in education over 30 years, MBA in International Business, and knowledge of e-learning systems implementation, together with graphic design background, give him a unique skill set for e-learning projects.

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