Projects for new developers

Getting Started

Moodle uses PHP, JavaScript and a number of other Web languages, so learning those is a good place to start.

When you have some basic PHP programming skills, you may wish to start learning about how to Moodle code is organised. It is recommended that you complete the Introduction to Moodle Programming course on dev.moodle.org. To access this you will need to have an account on moodle.org first.

If you are looking for projects suggested in the tracker, look for issues with the 'addon_candidate' label.

If you are looking to make a quick contribution, look for tracker issues with marked as easy.

As you become more involved in Moodle development, you might like to learn more about the coding conventions used and how changes to Moodle core code are processed.

Potential Projects

This evolving page lists possible Moodle projects for new developers derived from community suggestions.

If you have any ideas for new features in Moodle which might be suitable as projects for new developers, please see New feature ideas.

SCORM

There are various SCORM related projects I'd be interested in mentoring for GSOC in 2014.

• Fix/Improve built in SCORM navigation (MDL-25642 MDL-29193 MDL-39551)
• Improve SCORM performance, PHPDocs, compliance with coding guidelines. - There are a number of known areas of SCORM code that need a clean-up/re-structure - It would be good to audit all the scorm code and make it comply with Moodle's coding guidelines and improve the performance of the code - it would be good to implement MUC in areas that can make use of it - Ideally we would also rewrite the datamodels/scorm_*_.js.php files to separate the php from the js and make the JavaScript cache-able - (work started on this in MDL-35870) Other related bugs: MDL-41216 MDL-41665 MDL-42314
• SCORM reports - there are currently 3 SCORM reports - ideas on new report plugins would be considered as possible projects.

Skills required: PHP, JavaScript

Difficulty level: Medium -> Hard

Possible mentor: Dan Marsden

HTML maths editor

DragMath (http://www.dragmath.bham.ac.uk) is a nice equation editor that has been integrated with the Moodle editor for some time. However, it is implemented in Java, and that is becoming increasingly problematic, with increasing security warnings on the desktop, and limited support on mobile devices. We would like a new editor, keeping all the good parts of DragMath, but written in JavaScript. This could then be integrated with Moodle (and other web applications.)

See this forum thread: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=251627 for more.

Skills required: JavaScript

Difficulty level: Hard

Possible mentors: ?

New question types

This is not really a specific project idea, but I would like to point one an important general area:

With HTML5 the range of what can be done in a web browser keeps expanding. Can we use these possibilities to make new, much more interactive, question types for Moodle?

There are some ideas in this forum thread: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=222439

• a question type where students have to join things up correctly by adding lines to a diagram (for example to complete an electric circuit).
• a question type where students can change the colour of certain parts of a diagram, and they have to get it correct.
• ... I am sure there are more possible ideas. Use your imagination!

There are also some ideas which don't require complex HTML5 things:

• A 'Give 3 examples of ...' Question type. For example "Give three ways to speed up a chemical reaction:". Answer 'heat', 'increase concentration', 'catalyst' (in any order). However, 'warm it' might be an acceptable alternative, but 'heat', 'catalyst', 'warm it' should only score 2/3.
• An ordering question type. Probably based on the OU's qtype_ddwtos. The think that cannot do is give good credit for partially correct answer. For example 'F', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E' might be considered close to the right order, but if you do that with ddwtos it will score 0.
• A question type where students must highlight certain words in some text. E.g. "Find all the verbs in this paragraph."

Before proposing anything, please make sure you are familiar with the standard question types already available in Moodle, and the contributed question types that other people have already created.

Skills required: PHP & JavaScript

Difficulty level: Medium - Hard

Possible mentors: Tim Hunt

Bulk enrolment assigning enhancements

Currently enrolling/unenrolling users in multiple courses can only be done manually through the relevant courses. It would be great to be able to do this in bulk.

This project will extend the bulk user actions page (site admin > Users > Accounts) to allow assigning a role to a user in many courses easily; for example, enrolling one or more students in several courses. This bulk enrolling tool should be available for all roles within the site.

Other additional functionality should include:

• a new filter for courses,
• a bulk action to view a list of users with their course enrolments,
• export the list of user enrolments to a file, and
• other enhancements suggested by the community.

Skills required: PHP

Difficulty level: Medium

Mentor: Rossiani Wijaya

For further details see:

• Tracker issues MDL-10002, MDL-15449, MDL-17011 and
• forum post Bulk user actions improvement

Form text autosave

Moodle is a web based application which makes heavy use of text input from the web browser, a common annoyance from our users is loosing that text input into the browser. A common request is for input to be automatically saved or manually saved as a draft in order that input is not lost or can be worked on between sessions. Similar functions to this exist in web applications like wordpress or Gmail.

Your task would be to implement this feature in Moodle. It is important that you make consideration of the fact that unlike other applications like blogging engines - Moodle has a wide variety of places where text would need to be stored as draft (examples: a forum post, a quiz essay question, an online text assignment) and this solution should be universal across all long text entry fields.

If you are interested in this project it is important that you research the various attempts which have been made to implement this feature in Moodle, posts on the Moodle forums and demonstrate awareness in your application.

Skills required: PHP & JavaScript [YUI]

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentors:

For further details see:

• Tracker issue MDL-18014
• Related discussions: Usability idea for 2.3: Autosave User_Data_Always_Safe
• See also MDL-14963 and sub-tasks, where this functionality has been implemented specifically for the quiz. Is this the basis for a generic solution?

Implement HTML5 support as the default mode for mforms (moodleform)

We have an API to define and use forms in Moodle. This needs to be updated to support new HTML5 form attributes and elements for a better user experience.

The outcome should make the many forms defined in Moodle use HTML5 by default. (See MDL-35565)

It would be an added bonus to have the new elements incorporated into some of the more often used mforms (module settings forms, course settings forms, user forms ...).

Skills required: HTML5, PHP, JavaScript

Difficulty level: Hard

Possible mentors: Aparup Banerjee, Frédéric Massart

For further details see:

• Tracker issues MDL-35565, MDL-38181, MDL-38114, and
• Progress and Meter, a related article.

Enrolment UI improvements

The Enrolment user interface could do with an overhaul to improve its usability and accessibility. At present the key issues are:

• pagination of enrolled displayed;
• searching for users - currently not implemented; and
• JS popups - broken and inefficient in places, modal + focus issues.

It would be good to write a new interface offering improvements to the existing interface. This may include features and improvements such as:

• dynamic filtering (using JS);
• pagination;
• filter by letter (similar to mod_assign grading page); and
• improved/rewritten JS popups.

Things to consider for this project include:

• identifying the issues with the current interface, paying particular reference to:
  • courses with a small number of user enrolments;
  • courses with many user enrolments;
  • finding specific users; and
  • finding types of user.
• and also considering:
  • how usability and user experience can be improved;
  • creating reusable components that can be used elsewhere in moodle;
  • ensuring accessibility; and
  • maintaining a basic non-javascript version of the interface.

Another pending task is to refactor the code doing manual enrolment of cohort users - MDL-35618.

Skills required: PHP & JavaScript [YUI]

Difficulty level: Medium -> Hard

Possible mentors: Andrew Nicols

Plagiarism plugin

There are various commercial plugins available that use the Plagiarism API in Moodle, but because these plagiarism systems can require paid subscriptions, testing them can be difficult. I'd like to see a basic plugin developed that could be used for testing the Plagiarism API, providing simple useful functionality. All Plagiarism API functions for all Modules that support the API should be implemented and used. It could check the file contenthash against all other files uploaded in the Moodle files table and if a matching record is found it should display information about the duplicate submission including if the same student has submitted the file in a different course/activity or if a different user has uploaded the file with the same contenthash.

Skills required: PHP

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentor: Dan Marsden

Improve automated functional test writing interface

Mockup of the new interface

Automated functional testing is a huge step into the future of software development. In addition to unit testing, it allows software to be continuously tested for regressions as developers make changes to the system. This allows greater software quality, and in turn, greater confidence.

We automatically test Moodle's features by automating actions a real user would perform. This "tests" are written in a human-friendly language being made up of sentences like I follow "Edit settings" or I press on "Save changes". Currently we provide an interface to list sentences that can be used to form these "tests", called feature files. This project's aim is to improve this interface to assist developers creating new automated functional tests for Moodle.

The current user interface on the latest Moodle 2.5 development version looks like this. Sentences can be listed and filtered, but there is no further support from the page. It would be helpful to allow feature test files to be created and edited directly on this page. Users would be able to select and insert steps and add expected arguments to form sentences. Templates could be provided and tests could be syntax-checked within the interface, all with the goal of reducing human error.

A mockup of how the interface could appear is shown to the right.

Skills required: JavaScript & PHP (also Git)

Difficulty level: Easy - Medium

Possible mentors: David Monllaó, Michael de Raadt

Before applying, please be sure to read about Moodle's automated testing integration and understand it.

Assignment submission type URL submission

This is an idea for a new submission plugin for the assignment module. It will allow students to provide the URL to a webpage and the plugin will download the webpage and its embedded content to form a snapshot at the time of submission, collected together in a PDF file. The plugin will allow snapshots of multiple pages to be added to form a single submission. Optionally students could also provide correct bibliographic fields to identify the webpage author etc.

There is a skeleton of this plugin available as a starting point so the parts that would need to be implemented have less to do with the Moodle API and more to do with general php/curl development.

Skills required: PHP (also Git or others source version control systems)

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentor: Damyon Wiese

Iconic table of contents resource

Iconic table of contents resource mockup

A common practice employed by teachers is to create a label containing icons that are linked to activities or sections within the course.

This project would be to create a resource module that would allow teachers to create such iconic representations easily.

The resource would have an understanding of the sections and activities in a course, presenting them as options to the teacher, with the potential to use standard or custom icons. Icons should be easily arrangeable. Text labels below icons could be optionally visible, with text based on the titles of activities/resources being linked to.

The icons should be presented in a responsive CSS layout that wraps icons to the screen width. The resource should work with the multi-lang filter, hidden sections and paged course formats. The resource should be accessible to users of non-visual browsers and screen readers.

Skills required: PHP (and potentially YUI)

Difficulty level: Easy - Medium

Possible mentors: Michael de Raadt

Parent access

At present there is no official support for parent or mentor access in Moodle.

This project includes multiple stages: documenting use cases, suitable storage of parent-user relationship, new admin tools, reports and support in existing activities.

Skills required: PHP, Moodle access control and enrolments

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentors: Petr Škoda (škoďák)

Role definition export and import UI

This project includes defining of XML structure describing role permissions and settings, roles admin UI usability study, implementation of role export, new UI for creation of roles and resetting.

Skills required: PHP

Difficulty level: Easy

Possible mentors: Petr Škoda (škoďák)

LRS (Learning Record Store) plugin

A Learning Record Store (LRS) = a place to store learning records. With new event and logging framework it will be easy to integrate LRS with moodle.

Open source LRS which can be integrated:

• Learning locker
• ADL LRS

Skills required: PHP (and potentially YUI)

Difficulty level: Easy - Medium

Possible mentors: Rajesh Taneja

Event subscription plugin

This project includes creating a plugin that provides users with an interface to subscribe to various events in Moodle. When an event occurs in Moodle, a notification(via selected messaging plugin) should be sent to all the subscribers with relevant information.

Event Specs

Skills required: PHP (and potentially YUI)

Difficulty level: Easy

Possible mentors: Ankit Agarwal

See also

• GSOC - describing Moodle's involvement with Google in their Summer of Code program
• Popular new feature and improvement requests in Tracker