Re: [Fwd: Re: [WWdevel] feedback e-mail subject line]

[Sam H. <sh...@ma...>]

On Sep 18, 2005, at 14:32, Sam Hathaway wrote:

> The only sane way I can think of is to rewrite the file completely  
> every time it is edited. However, this destroys any special  
> formatting or logic that the user has done by editing the file  
> directly, as well as any comments or commented-out code. The nice  
> thing is, the people who would use the web interface are probably  
> not the same people who are doing complicated things in their  
> course.conf files.
>
> An improvement on this is to define a special section in the  
> course.conf file that would be written programatically in response  
> to the user's choices in the GUI. The text before and after that  
> section would also be editable, but as two undifferentiated chunks  
> in textareas.

Here's an idea, courtesy Dennis Lambe.

We figure out what things users commonly want to change. We create a  
UI for setting those things. It reads and writes simple key-value  
pairs (in a file? in the database?) that are then used to seed the  
course environment. This doesn't require us to edit the conf files  
programmatically, and doesn't remove any flexibility from the conf  
files themselves.

We can add things to the "simple" settings format as needed, and the  
global.conf/course.conf files will kind of fade into the source code  
as editing them becomes less and less necessary.
-sam