It looks like the original “Moodle” account has graciously given it to Martin Dougiamas and Moodle. Moodle’s lastest tweet reads:

Thanks Charlene for giving us your “moodle” twitter account! The plan is to use it for official news about Moodle software and community.

Follow Moodle now!

Check out the Moodle Moots coming up in the next few months via Moodle Announcements.

My co-worker and I have been looking into attending a Moodle Moot. Our district has an idea of putting on our own Moodle Moot, or Moodle Workshop (on a smaller scale), in the future and attending an actual Moot would greatly benefit us. We have been looking into the Canada one or perhaps one in Oklahoma or San Francisco. Check out the main Moodle Moot page.

Have you any ideas how Moodle navigation (including blocks, layout and themes) can be improved? [read more]

From Moodle.org, Helen Foster writes a post about the navigation in Moodle 2.0. Read more and see what Martin Dougiamas says about solutions.

From Moodle.org Announcements:

Have you any ideas for new features you’d like included in Moodle? If so, please see our documentation New feature ideas for information on the process of how ideas can be turned into reality.

Now is a particularly good time to come up with ideas for new features, as we’re hoping to take part in Google Summer of Code 2009, so we need lots of great ideas for student projects. Please see the discussion Wanted: New feature ideas for GSOC projects in the general developer forum for more details.

Source: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=116731

Martin Dougiamas tells us how to prevent spam

“One of the most common security issues that we see in Moodle sites is profile spam.

Profile spam is primarily a problem on sites with the combination of these two settings:

1. email authentication is enabled, allowing people to self-create an account on the site
2. the admin setting forceloginforprofiles is disabled, allowing anyone to see and link to user profiles

Some older versions of Moodle had these as default.

The problems with these settings is that spammers can create a page on the Moodle site which they can fill with links and pictures of porn and other nasty stuff. This in turn comes up in Google searches for those things, and is used to boost ratings to porn sites or hacking sites designed to take over your personal computer. Note that this content is designed for people using search engines, and is usually not available from within the Moodle site itself (since spammers don’t join any courses) so users and admins are usually not even aware their site is having this problem.

Please pass the word to all Moodle admins that you know to check these Moodle site settings and make sure their sites are not vulnerable to profile spam. Email authentication should be disabled if not needed, and if it can’t then forceloginforprofiles should definitely be enabled.

Please also use our spam-cleaning tool to scan your site to find affected profiles and delete them. This page in the docs has more details: Reducing_spam_in_Moodle and you can also get help in the Security and Privacy forum.” – from Moodle.org Moodle Announcements

Source: Moodle.org Moodle Announcements

Are you interested in Moodle developer news and finding out what we’re currently working on? If so, please visit and/or subscribe to Planet Moodle. [from Moodle.org Announcements - Read More]

Lately I have been trying to find blogs, web sites and social networking sites that revolve around Moodle. I found a few great blogs like The Moodleman Blog, Taming Moodle, Global Classroom and a Moodle Tutorials Blog. I am also a member of the Ning groups Moodle Meet and Moodlers.

However, considering how popular Moodle is I expect there to be more blogs, sites and communities revolving around Moodle. I would think that Moodle, being an open-source product, would have more communities and sites with resoures because the open-source community is known to be large and very collaborative. I wonder why this is–maybe I am just not looking in the right places or maybe it is because Moodle.org has such great documentation and a great community itself that any other community would just not be as good. Don’t get me wrong Moodle.org has the best, most complete documentation, help and awesome forums to get an answer but where are the communities or social networking sites that focus on things like “Moodle in Elementary Schools”, “Teachers using Moodle in the classroom”? A place where teachers can collaborate and get ideas from other teachers using Moodle.

The two Ning Moodle communities are pretty good but there is not a ton of user action. I guess I just expected there to be more out there about Moodle, whether it’s a web site, blog or community because Moodle is getting very popular.

I would greatly appreciate any suggested Moodle sites, blogs or resources!

In my last post I mentioned the new Moodle Porgramming Course you can enroll in for free (hosted on moodle.org). After posting I decided to enroll myself and see what it is all about. I was little hesitant to enroll because I was worried I wouldn’t have enough time to really get into the course but I enrolled and it looks great!

You can go at your own pace, communicate with other Moodlers and really grasp a variety of ideas surrounding Moodle. I am still on the first unit but I already like it so far. You go through the course just like any other online course. You do assignments, post in forums, talk with others and actually get feedback on your assignments.

More to come as I dig deeper into this course. Check out the Moodle Programming course if you have not already!