Add CPD to Mahara core

[Dominique-Alain JAN]

I discovered James Kerrigan and Geoffrey Rowland's plugin called CPD. I really think this was missing in Mahara. In a portfolio people (stakeholders) are interested in recording actions for their Continuing Professional Development (CPD), Personal Development Planning (PDP), or their Further Training Activities. Personal Development Planning also became compulsory for some professions in Scotland and in other parts of EU.

Therefore I suggest the code of this plugin being embedded into Mahara core development.

http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=3593
https://github.com/geoffrowland/mahara-artefact_cpds

[Melissa Draper (melissa)]

When installing the plugin, the package adds both a blocktype and an artefact. The blocktype has a description next to it asserting that it will install automatically when the artefact is installed. This isn't true, you have to click install on it after installing the artefact.

[Melissa Draper (melissa)]

Other than that, the functionality seems fine and the code seems clean and readable.

[Melissa Draper (melissa)]

Hugh notes that a change similar to https://reviews.mahara.org/211 will be required

[Darryl Hamilton (lordp)]

https://reviews.mahara.org/424

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Currently the CPD block is in the "General" tab.

Should we rename the "Résumé" tab to "Career" and then move CPD in there too?

[François Marier (fmarier)]

(Note that I'm talking about the block tab in the view editor, NOT the artefact tab under "Content".)

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Your suggestion is a sensible one, Francois, as these two are closely related. The only thing is that it would not denote an artefact item anymore, but be more content-oriented. In a way, as it is a log, it could also live in "Journals".

I think with more plugins being developed for Mahara, we will have this discussion soon again. Where do you put them? Where would the chemistry plugins and the FreeMind plugin go? General doesn't seem to be a good dumping ground. Sometimes, as with GoogleApps, it's easy to find a place in a given tab, but at other times, maybe a new tab would be better? Could this be done or should we re-think the tabs altogether?

[François Marier (fmarier)]

One of the problems with bringing this plugin into core is that it would introduce a lot of code duplication.

(It's essentially a copy of the plans functionality with a bunch of fields renamed.)

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Could we consolidate these two things then with options that a user chooses, e.g. whether to set up a standard plan or a developmental plan? Because essentially, they are both plans.

[Dominique-Alain JAN (dajan)]

Is there a chance someone has time to come back on this issue? Or do we close it as "won't fix" ?

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hi dajan. I would leave it on the wishlist for the time being, but as noted earlier, we shouldn't introduce the plugin into Mahara core as it is as it would mean code duplications. If you have funding available to bring it in, we can bump it up on the priority list.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Way forward is to merge it with plans and have option to select whether to display hours or not when creating the plan rather than having lots of duplicated code.