Managing blocks

Manage blocks

An administrator can manage Moodle's blocks for the site in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Blocks > Manage blocks, including any contributed blocks that have been added.

Instances

The blocks page lists the number of instance for each block. Clicking on a number results in the list of courses containing that block being displayed. See Block settings for configuration settings that might be of interest to a site administrator or someone with Front Page editing permissions.

Version

Listed with each block is its version number — in the format 2012061700. This is helpful to ensure that you have the latest version of each block.

Hiding a block

The hide/show column allows selected blocks to be hidden i.e. they do not appear in any course "Add a block" dropdown menu and cannot be used in any course. To hide a block, click the eye icon so that it changes to a closed eye.

To reduce the length of course "Add a block" dropdown menus, you should hide blocks which will not be used, such as mentees (unless you have added a mentor role) and network servers (unless you are using Moodle Networking).

Protecting blocks from deletion

By clicking the padlock against a block in this column, you are preventing it from being deleted on the site. The Administration block and Navigation block cannot be uninstalled from the admin interface. Note that these blocks are not used if you use a Boost theme or Boost based theme.

Block deletion

Blocks can be deleted using the Uninstall link for the appropriate block. There is usually no reason for standard blocks to be uninstalled (they are usually hidden) However, non-standard blocks may need to be uninstalled before upgrading.

Note: To delete a block completely, in addition to uninstalling it on the blocks page, you also need to remove/delete the actual block folder from the moodle/blocks folder, otherwise Moodle will reinstall it next time you access the site administration.

Block settings

Certain blocks have additional settings, which can be accessed via the links in the settings column.

Block capabilities

• Manage dashboard blocks
• Edit blocks in tags pages
• Manage blocks on own public user profile
• Manage blocks on user profile of other users
• Edit a block's settings
• View block
• Manage blocks on a page

In addition, every block has an addinstance capability (e.g. block/comments:addinstance) and most blocks also have a myaddinstance capability (e.g. block/comments:myaddinstance) for controlling whether a user with a particular role can add the block to a page or to their Dashboard respectively.

Contributed blocks

In addition to using the blocks included in the standard download, other Moodlers have developed their own blocks which they share with the Moodle community. You can download these contributed blocks from the Moodle.org Moodle Plugins directory. See Installing plugins for details of how to install a block.

See also

• Block layout