SWF-Activity-Module
Maintained by
Matt Bury
The SWF Activity Module is a Moodle plugin for deploying multimedia Flash learning applications, also known as Flash templates, videos, and playlists.
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Great work!
I have one observation/question... When playing a stored video, I have a green bar (appears to be the background) showing up in the bottom 1/4 of the playback window. Would like not to see that. Is there a specific size for the original video I need to use? Other thoughts? I will be glad to let you into my system to see what I am talking about if that would help.
Jim
Re: pushing grades, here's the story so far:
I chose AmfPHP as the interface with Moodle because it's powerful, flexible and easy to use. There's so much you can do with it.
AmfPHP 1.9 still works with Moodle 2.5 and later if the server is running PHP 5.3. It doesn't work with PHP 5.4 or later.
AmfPHP 2.1 works with PHP 5.3 and later. It also works with Moodle 2.5 with everything except that the $USER object doesn't instantiate. The $USER object is essential to do just about anything in Moodle and I can't find out why it isn't working when all the other objects; $CFG, $COURSE, etc.; are.
So, if your server is running PHP 5.4 or later, no version AmfPHP will work with Moodle.
In the latest version here, I've included a PHP script /moodle/mod/swf/scripts/gradeupdate.php which takes regular HTTP(S) POST and GET calls and pushes grades. It requires:
instance (int) Moodle instance ID
swfid (int) SWF instance ID
rawgrade (int) 1 - 100 (fails if grade is 0)
feedbackformat (int) Elapsed time in seconds (recorded by Flash apps). This gets concatenated to the front of feedback with ||| as a delimiter, since the gradebook doesn't have a column for elapsed time. I used to store it in the feedbackformat column but not any more. I might change the name of this to something like 'elapsedtime' or 'timeelapsed' to be more coherent and consistent.
feedback (string) Any text you want to push into the comments/feedback column of the gradebook
This'll have to do until the AmfPHP situation gets resolved. If this never happens, then we won't be able to do more advanced stuff so easily but at least pushing grades will work. The SWF Debugger app, which is free and open source, contains some example code for pushing grades via gradeupdate.php as well as being compatible with AmfPHP 1.9 and 2.1, if it's working: https://github.com/matbury/SWF-Debugger
Just a quick reminder not to use the SWF Activity Module for 2.5+ on production sites. I'm not including upgrade scripts so each new upgrade will require you to uninstall and reinstall the module. Once everything's more or less as it should be, I can release it as 'stable' and include upgrade scripts from then on.
I hope this helps!
First of all happy new year. I've been trying out your version of the SWF module for the 2.5 moodle version and its working fine. My only issue is that the function i used for the moodle 1.9 to be able to send the grades from the swf files to the moodle's gradebook doesn't work with your new version. I'd like to know what function i should include in my swf files now to be able to send the grades to moodle 2.5.
Sincerely yours,
I put 2.5+ because that's what I'm testing it with. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work on Moodle 2.3+ (when the File System repository was introduced).
Please note that this module is still in beta and any updates to it require you to completely uninstall and reinstall the moodle/mod/swf/ part of the module, i.e. I'm not putting in upgrade scripts yet. This makes it unsuitable for public/production Moodles.
Once it's in full production/public release, it'll upgrade normally like any other module.
Matt
could you consider renaming README to readme.txt. otherwise its not easy to actually read it