Exactly. Learning Management Systems such as moodle are little walled gardens that house lots of info about each individual student (who authenticates through the university’s SSO, single sign-on).
A plugin filter like generico enables me (with some admin help, since I don’t have access) to set up “templates” that splice that data into bits of dynamic html that I can then serve up to students. In particular, I use this plugin’s functions to build an iframe with a permalink that includes a couple (non-missing) default tiddlers, along with “tiddlers” based on data fields from moodle.
My actual TW5 does not use student names, nor does it use official student ID numbers in it. That’s because it’s hosted off campus, and I haven’t yet found a way to host it on a campus server while keeping it as edit-on-the-fly easy as it is at tiddlyhost. Although students access it though the LMS, it wouldn’t be that hard to find its real home online (say, by discovering some of my posts here documenting the evolution of the site. ) It has lots of read-only css, but of course “view source” is always an option for a hosted file that’s not encrypted (and I’m so far from wanting to set up individual encryption for each student!).
For all these reasons, my teaching wikis don’t even have anything like a “tiddler” corresponding to each student. I do of course have student-specific strings tucked away in various fields (ones that are out of reach of the standard search window, and very hard to get at via the iframe portal without significant hacking skills).
Once the permaview puts these student-specific “missing” tiddlers in the story river, I can extract what’s needed for meaningful filters, given some basic assumptions (that one of the missing tiddlers is a numeric string of so-many-digits, another is an alpha string of such-and-such format, etc.). Those filters drive how a template can effectively display custom info for each authenticated student.
And, to make it nice, I can have the student’s first name displayed in various places (since the LMS is feeding it into the permaview) even though the student names are nowhere to be found in the html.
But the seamless feeling is lost if there’s a tiddler-frame-sized banner in the story river corresponding to each of these “missing tiddlers.” Also, I don’t want them to be intentionally or unintentionally closed, thus destroying how their function should survive during the duration of the iframe session.