Someday a researcher could write a book about the careful and deliberate way that Moodle has resisted certain features through time. Knowing that schools take their discussion forums very seriously, core has avoided complicating Moodle’s basic forums for many years.
But then there are those power-users who want more features. Some developers at Humboldt University were the first to begin tweaking Moodle’s forums in 1.x with a Mellon Foundation Grant. Next came Marylhurst College and Idaho State University who continued to envision updates to the Humboldt code by requesting anonymous forums, private replies to posts, views of posters, discussion sorting, individual topic subscriptions, instructor highlighting (teacher marks key posts for students to read), etc.. And born out of these evolving, additional requirements, the developers at Moodlerooms updated and re-designed Advanced Forums for 1.9, then later for 2.x.
Today we are excited to release Advanced Forums for 2.x to the larger Moodle Community. If you host Moodle, we encourage you to visit the Moodle plug-in database and download the Advanced Forums module. Documentation for the feature is available at the Moodle docs site.
Like all the plug-ins that we release, Moodlerooms follows strict Moodle coding guidelines for security, for course backup and restore, and we avoid conflicts with the existing core forums (which are wired pretty tightly into Moodle). Nearly 25% of our clients have been using Advanced Forums over the past three years, and many of these clients have upgraded to the 2.x Advanced Forums as part of their upgrade path.
This is the tension between keeping software simple versus providing cool, advanced features that are hard to live without. We hope that schools that want these extra Moodle features will enjoy this plugin as much as our clients have appreciated them. For tips and tricks for this new feature, check out our recent Best Practices post.
All the best,
Tom
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