Moodle at Wesleyan

Our consortial partners have identified a problem where the latest version of FireFox (11) does not readily allow a user to edit more than one rich-text area on a single page. They have also found a short-term workaround and a long-term solution for the problem.

Problem description:

On a page with more than one rich-text area, no area other than the first is readily usable. The editing buttons appear normally, but clicking in the editable area has no affect.

Context:

You will see this problem only if:

1. You are using FireFox 11, AND
2. You are working on a page with more than one rich-text editing area.

Few Moodle pages have more than one rich-text editing area. A rich-text editing area looks like this:

The most likely place to find multiple rich-text editing areas on a single page is in the 'compose a web page' interface. Fortunately, these pages are not among the most frequently used resources.

Short-term workarounds:

1. One obvious workaround is to use a different browser to create or update these pages.
2. Even in FireFox 11, however, you can successfully edit any rich-text area by activating the full screen mode for that area. You can activate full screen editing by clicking on the screen icon (second to last in the top row of editing buttons). You will have to click the button again to close full screen editing in order to save your work. When you close full screen editing you will no longer see your work, but when you save and display the page it will show up as expected.

Affected Moodle versions:

The problem affects core Moodle versions as well as the CLAMP versions we are using.

Long-term solution:

The long-term solution is to upgrade the code module that powers the rich-text editor (TinyMCE). The upgrade is not simple because of the tight integration between the editor and core code, but fellow CLAMP developers have an experimental upgrade working and ready for testing. We expect to apply the fix as soon as we have confidence in its stability.