According to her note to Moodlenews,

I have elaborated a guide about how to set up a staging Moodle, as a replica of the production site, which I have shared with the Moodle UK community. I would like to share the guide with the rest of the community. Coming myself from an original Linux background, I think that the guide could be very useful for those administrators-technicians who have to start using Moodle in a windows server.

Within the PDF Mari Cruz provides the 7 steps in detail of how to copy your production Moodle site for staging and/or testing.

From gathering information to configuring the new installation it’s all detailed.

1. Basic requirements
2. folders structure
3. IIS configuration
4. Changes in php.ini
5. configuration of MySQL
6. Restoring Moodle from backup database
7. configuring Moodle

The guide also links to handy tools/resources to make the process easier.

Download the guide: Setting up a Moodle staging server (general version)

Watch the video here: http://vimeo.com/32160183 or embedded below. The video was created by Willard High School and was recently used in an Opensource.com post authored by Janetta Garton.

Use Labels to Create Menus in Moodle from Willard High School on Vimeo.

Sounds a bit like the MediaBird Study Notes module. However, this Portugese-made block is less complex, but simpler to install and to use.

Here are its main features:

• Assign up to THREE priority levels for each note;
• Sort notes by last modification or priority level;
• Easy visualization and edition of notes with popup windows;
• Global configuration for the length of note previews inside the block.

I had always wished that there could be a block that shows the student how many stamps he or she has earned. Why? This is because at the moment, the student has to click on the Stamp Collection module to view the stamps earned. So this evening, I sat down to craft such a block. And I failed miserably because of my lack of experience in PHP coding!

Undeterred, I had a brainwave of how I could achieve the same effect as a real block. Within 4 hours, I crafted something that made use of David’s existing code, HTML, PHP and some tricks. Here’s what it looks like:

So the advantage of this ‘block’ is that the student can see his Stamp collection. Is it growing? Is it stagnant? Oh, and I’m also glad to mention that if the student does a mouseover on any of the stamps (gold stars), the description of the stamp is displayed. See the image below:

So what do you think? Do you like this ‘block’? Are you already using the Stamp Collection module by David Mudrak on your Moodle 1.9.x? Would you like to know how you can set up this pseudo-block on your Moodle 1.9.x site as well? You do? GREAT! Let’s dive in!

Instructions to setup the Stamp Collection Pseudo-block
Read here >>

The course focuses on opportunities to learn about mobile computing in classrooms (with current events curated through Scoop.it), videos and demos of Mobile courses, additional web resources, Free mobile apps, mobile ideas for your courses and more.

The ‘Mobile Ideas for your Course’ section is my favorite.  It pulls articles and ideas from sources helping you to learn how to use Google Goggles in the classroom, Google+ Hangouts, QR Codes, how to create slideshows and much more.

These resources and more are hosted at the Tempus-EFA project Moodle.

Information Overload 
It lists ALL recent activity, including forum posts in any and all forums by any and all users. Hence, one can easily get lost in all the details that appear in that block. In addition, if there was a lot of recent activity in the last 24 to 48 hours, then the block will take up a lot of vertical real estate on your Moodle course page!

Enter the “New Replies to my posts” block

Deep from the recesses of moodle.org, I have unearthed a year 2008 block that lists replies to your forum posts. It was written by Niall Barr. What does it do? It is an alternative new forum posts block that only displays new posts in threads that the current user has posted messages in.

When as teachers, we want to encourage (force!?) forum postings among ALL students in a class. Therefore, any tool that can motivate our students to post replies in forums, is greatly welcomed.

Here’s a forum post and tracker link that mention this block. It currently runs only under Moodle 1.9.x, but it is due to support Moodle 2.x in March 2012 according to this other tracker link.

Comments and Word-Of-Mouth

Here are some comments from Moodlers who have used this block:

Our students do everything on Facebook because it has this kind of functionality. It makes online conversations easy. Moodle forums need this because it gives them a bit of the functionality of Facebook. Please put this into the core so that my administrators will install it at my school. Thanks. - Jonathan Andreas

Should definitely be core, if it is not already. Dynamite block and has increased forum participation exponentially! This block is AWESOME! Loaded on our test server and I LOVE IT. Thanks to all who contributed to its development. … Staff/Students will love it. … a real time-saver and assist me in tracking my specific issues. … it has brought SO MUCH MORE interaction and engagement in forums to our course. I could not live without it! - Deb Burdick-Hinton

I couldn’t resist installing this block. It was very easy to install on my Moodle 1.9.15 production site. I then logged in with a student account or two and used those accounts to make replies to my own forum posts. Here’s what the “New replies to my posts” block displayed:

Now what you see may lack the pizzazz that you were expecting, but it really is exciting because it alerts and informs the forum poster of replies to his or her posts. Never mind that the output is fully text-based. This functionality now cranks up the interactivity of forum posts and replies a notch or two higher. The net result is that your teachers and students will get the satisfaction of receiving attention to their thoughts and opinions via replies from others. If you have ever posted a comment on an online forum, and received a reply, the feeling is GREAT.

Find a copy of the block to download here: http://tracker.moodle.org/secure/attachment/14653/block_new_forum_replies_20080724.zip

For installation instructions and more details, read here >>

The challenge: 
Recently I was using the Book resource to encapsulate articles on Sew What? Incorporated.  I was doing this work as part of my teaching of MIS at Stamford College Malacca, specifically a case study the Sew What Inc. So anyway, I discovered that I wanted to increase the width of the reading area of the Book resource. Why would I want to do that? I was embedding a Dell webpage into a book chapter and I found that

1. I couldn’t view the embedded webpage’s entire width within the book
2. the embedded content did not fit inside the right area of the book resource. The embedded website needed horizontal scroll bars (hmmm….) at the bottom of the display area in order for me to view the Dell site in its entirety.

When you click on a link on the TOC (Table of Contents) in a book, you would want to view the right-hand-side content easily, and with no fuss. In this case, using the mouse to scroll left was very irritating.

BTW, here’s the embedded code that I used in the reading area.

<table cellspacing="0" style="width:100% !important;background:#999 !important;padding:0px !important;margin:0px !important;border:0px !important;border-collapse:collapse !important"><tr><td style="background:#999 !important;padding:1px !important;margin:0px !important;border:0px !important;"><iframe src="http://www.dell.com/html/us/segments/bsd/case_studies/sew/index.html" scrolling="yes" frameborder="0" style="display:block !important;width:100% !important;height:400px !important;background:#D4D0C8 !important;padding:0px !important;margin:0px !important;border:0px !important;"><a href="http://moodurian.com/">Moodurian.com</a>; (iframes required)</iframe></td></tr></table>

The embedded code worked, but unfortunately the content did not fit nicely inside the Book’s reading area.  By default, the width of the TOC (located on the left) is 140 pixels.To solve this, I …(read more here) >>

You’re on your Moodle course page. Just before you go to make phone call, you display a BRB (Be Right Back) status next to your username on the block. Or before you attempt a quiz for the next one hour, you display a Busy status.

Well, I’ve done it on my Moodle site, and so can you. All thanks to a talented Italian PHP developer named Matteo Scaramuccia.  Thanks for help on the PHP code, mate! Much appreciated and credit to you, Matteo.

A trivial feature? Frivolous? Childish? A complete waste of time? Tell you what, give it a try on your victims, erm…I mean users. Inform them of this feature. Demo it to them. Then sit back and see what happens. If no one in the class sets a mood for others to see, then yeah, this is a waste of time. But if just one student sets his or her mood, then you might have chanced upon something here. Perhaps you have managed to make Moodle a bit more human-like. A bit more Web 2.0ish. Perhaps this one feature will make the Moodle experience a bit more social for your students.

If you would like to experiment with this feature on your students, read on! Otherwise, well, you can just hit the Back button of your web browser.

Still with me? Great! Here’s how we did it. >>

1. First things first you’ll want to construct your course and have it all ready to work (or as close to it as possible).  If you’re using Moodle 1.9 or 2.x you can add the “Section Links” block which will use to copy some URLs.
2. Copy the URLs to each Topic section and paste them to a text document for quick reference.  The Topic link URLs will help student navigate to an individual section.  They generally look like this:

   http://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?id=2&topic=1

   The first part of the URL is your domain, then the course ID then the topic number.

3. Next we’re going to add a new label to each topic area (not including the Summary of the Topic Outline, this will always be visible).  The new label will include a snippet of HTML to create a single row, double column table.  In the left cell you can have just text or an image arrow which will be linked to the previous topic link, in the right cell you’ll have text or an image arrow linked to the next topic link.  This is the snippet for text only which you should add as plain text in the html editor (the HTML or <> buttons depending on your Moodle version):

   <table border="0" width="100%">
   <tbody>
   <tr>
   <td><strong><a href="http://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?id=2&topic=0">&lt; Previous</a></strong></td>
   <td style="text-align: right;"><strong><a href="http://yourmoodle.com/course/view.php?id=2&topic=2">Next &gt;</a></strong></td>
   </tr>
   </tbody>
   </table>

   This includes the HTML for the table, links and text (“< Previous” and “Next >”) and the URL of the topic link.  This is important: for every previous and next just edit the topic number to represent the previous (if this is topic 1 you can just delete the “previous” text).

4. Continue adding labels to each of your topics and edit the HTML accordingly.

Once you’ve added all the labels the individual topics should look something like this:

As long as you’re not constantly reordering your course topics this is a simple and effective way to provide an easier navigation with no scroll of death to students without adding any new course formats or hacking the topics format with invisible resources and activities.  Here’s a quick video of it in action: