development Archives - ElearningWorld.org

Gource

Gareth Barnard — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000

This time of year is one for reflection on what has been. Two of those reflections for me has been

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Reactive?

Gareth Barnard — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Since 4.0, Moodle now employs a reactive user interface (UI) (moodledev.io/docs/5.1/guides/javascript/reactive) for editing content. With JavaScript being my weakest skill,

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Debugging SCSS

Gareth Barnard — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Introduction You’re customising your Moodle site using CSS / SCSS, perhaps with a plugin or in theme, then suddenly your

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Settings transfer

Gareth Barnard — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Introduction A long time ago, seven and a half years or so, when I was involved with and maintaining the

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What is a developer?

Gareth Barnard — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0000

In our world these days we interact with advanced machines, machines that are the result of centuries of human tool development. They are complex and require careful configuration to ensure that they operate in the way we intend them to do so. There are many ‘configurations’ with varying levels of complexity. Take the software that runs on the machine, that is a ‘configuration’ that is instructions that tell the machine what to do, and yet that has a ‘configuration’ too, a set of values associated with the particular operational functionality of the software, the settings. Hopefully that configuration you can manage yourself from the information provided to you by the developer (or via a technical writer) on what each setting does. But what of the actual software? How is this created? What is this mysterious person ‘The Developer’?

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A little bit #fab

Gareth Barnard — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Introduction With the introduction of H5P in Moodle and having themes that allow us to customise the look brings the

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Challenge accepted!

Gareth Barnard — Mon, 15 May 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Recently a mate of mine had been mulling over a puzzle that he’d found via Reddit and couldn’t solve. It goes something like this "You can only be exactly twice someone’s age once, and it’s when they turn the same age you were when they were born. Every birthday after that makes you less than twice their age". So I thought, ‘Hang on a moment! I’ve been writing calendar orientated small Java programs, Java has a “GregorianCalendar” class that I can use, and you can perform time functions! Challenge accepted!’.

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Some more Java

Gareth Barnard — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

As a follow on from ‘A little bit more Java’, this time we will progress to look at how we can input from the command line and enhance our program even further. The beginnings of a program can be an uphill struggle as we work away to get something that actually does something. Now we’ve made progress, that hill will start to soften and we’ll be able to add more functionality now that we have our base.

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Calendar

Gareth Barnard — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

In recent years, I’ve been creating a calendar using images that I’ve taken. Back in 2002, I created a small Java program that prints out the calendar for the next twelve months. In my themes and on the MoodleBites eLearningWorld theme courses I have code that arranges the Moodle blocks horizontally, this is partly facilitated through the employment of column CSS classes that are based upon the ideas implemented in the Bootstrap framework. Combine all of these thoughts, and add to my recent posts with Java then I thought ‘Why can’t I get Java to create a calendar just like the one I have printed?’. And that’s what this month is all about, where we will additionally see how pre-processing of HTML output can be designed and implemented from scratch.

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A little bit more Java

Gareth Barnard — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:00:00 +0000

As a follow on from ‘A little bit of Java’, I thought that we’d progress into something a bit more complicated. The thing is with software creation is that the initial learning curve is steep, but once you’ve gotten over that then things do become easier. One way of climbing that initial curve is to have a defined goal with an outcome that you strive to reach. The program also needs to have a purpose so that it does something useful for us. Then we will be motivated to attain the goal of achieving our solution when things get tricky. Therefore our program will take text that we enter and apply a ‘Substitution cipher’ and tell us the result. That result we can then enter again and get what we originally typed back.

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