Etherpad Lite

Hello Thomasz, hello David,
yes it was waiting. I think there were some issues with the moodle.org site and this plugin was lost for some months.. No matter what, now it is here ;)
The Humboldt University of Berlin is actively using this plugin, so it will be maintained, not only by me, but the other staff, too.
I uploaded our new version for Moodle 2.7
We would be very pleased, if you can help.
Best regards
Timo

Marking this as needing more work so that it can be clarified and confirmed that the most recent versions were uploaded here to be reviewed. Thanks in advance.

There are recent commits in the plugin's Github repository. Timo, please note we are not automatically pulling from your Github repo. Maintainers are always supposed to upload new versions here via the button "Add a new version".

Has this really been waiting since May 2014?
Timo, are you still interested in maintenance of the plugin? I could help with the review & testing.
Tomek

Hi Anthony,
thank you very much for your thorough review and your advice. I think I got everything fixed you mentioned.
For the documentation, I would like to use the github page, to prevent redundancy.
Regarding the other plugin by Chris (https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=mod_etherpad):
It was just coincidence, that we started developing an etherpad-lite plugin for moodle at about the same time.
We first heard about the other plugin as it was uploaded to moodle.org and etherpad.org mentioned it in their blog.
We considered the plugin but still kept developing our own plugin, because we decided that we need more security and a deeper integration with the API of etherpad:
- The user should only be able to access the pad, when he has access to the course.
- It should be possible to configure the etherpad server, so that only pads, which are created via moodle are allowed (Otherwise anyone who knows the url of the server could create and modify pads).
- The user should be linked to an etherpad user, so that he keeps his color, when he access the pad another time.
- Import/export of a pad via moodle
- Optional check of the https certificate, to prevent men in the middle attacks
- Redirection of moodle to https, when the given etherpad server uses https
- Option to allow/prevent guests to write (if not, a guest still can see the contents)
In the process of development, we also had contact with the team of etherpad-lite and helped with bug-fixes.
We didn't upload our plugin to the moodle.org database, because we did not want to provide a plugin, which we would maybe not be able to maintain after some time. Etherpad-lite was still very new and we wanted to see, how it will be used and accepted. Now, that it is established at our university, we will (and have the duty to) support and actively maintain it.
I contacted Chris in the comment section of his module, to inform him about our submission.
Best Regards
Timo Welde
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Many thanks for sharing this plugin with the Moodle community. I want to make sure that it is clear that the etherpad-lite server needs to be installed to use this plugin. I modified the short description to make this clear and moved the Prerequisite section to the top in the longer description.
Please review the validation results and fix all of the issues mentioned. These changes are typically pretty easy to make but if you have any questions just let us know.
Validation warnings:
Warning The usage of $module in mod/xxx/version.php files was deprecated in Moodle 2.7. It is recommended to use the $plugin notation which has been supported since Moodle 2.5
Warning Maturity information ($module->maturity) not found in version.php
Warning Release name ($module->release) not found in version.php
Please provide a documentation URL. You are welcome to create your documentation in Moodle Docs, See http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugin_documentation for more information. Please consider adding a screenshot of your plugin to help folks get an idea of what it looks like when installed.
I see that this code is very similar to another plugin that has already been approved - namely, https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=mod_etherpad. I am concerned that it would be confusing to the community to have 2 plugins that are so similar. My guess as to what happened is that Timo originally developed the code and that Chris took the initiative to share the code with Moodle plugins and agreed to maintain the code. In any cas., I try to encourage developers of similar code to collaborate on such projects. Could you provide a little bit of history about the development of this code?
I was successfully abe to install the plugin; however, I did not install an etherpad-lite server to do extensive testing.
I noticed that the recommnded boilerplate was not used in the version.php file. The boilerplate is recommended at the beginning of eachfile and makesexplicit the GPL license. You maywant to review http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Coding_style#Files to learn more about the boilerplate comments.
For now, Iam going to mark this plugin as needing more work until we get these issues resolved. Thanks for your patience with the review and approval process. Please do not hesitate to let me know if there is anything I can do to be supportive of yur efforts. Peace - Anthony