Projects for new developers

Getting started

• Moodle uses PHP, JavaScript, SQL 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 the Moodle code is organised. It is recommended that you go through the Tutorial.
• 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. Once you become confident enough, please consider adopting a plugin seeking a new maintainer.

Potential projects

This evolving page lists possible Moodle projects for new developers derived from community suggestions and lists projects together with experienced core developers willing to mentor new developers.

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

Improve SCORM plugin

There are a number of areas of SCORM that could be improved as part of a GSOC project, some of these are bigger projects and others could be combined to form a single project.

These are just some examples, take a look at the open SCORM issues in the Moodle tracker for a list of other issues.

• Improve Grading (MDL-51086, MDL-52871, MDL-37421)
• Improve validation of SCORM packages (MDL-38060, MDL-24057)
• Convert YUI Treeview to use Jquery (Moodle is moving away from YUI and the existing Treeview has a few issues)
• Choose where to send users after completing SCORM (MDL-61677)

Requirement for prospective students:

• We require prospective students to make an attempt at fixing at least 1 issue in the Moodle tracker before their proposal can be considered. This MUST be completed before your application can be considered valid.

Skills required: PHP

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentor: Dan Marsden

Acceptance tests for the Moodle app

Since Moodle 3.7 it will be possible to write and run acceptance tests for the Moodle app.

Tasks:

• Write new acceptance tests for the Moodle app

Requirement for prospective students:

• We require prospective students to set-up and run in a local environment the existing tests following this documentation: Acceptance testing for the mobile app, students must record a video of the tests running on a local machine.
• We also require students to create an additional simple test (detailed instructions for writing tests are available in the previous link)

Skills required: Behat (PHP)

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentor: Juan Leyva

Front-end editor for the plugin skeleton generator

This is a follow-up project for a successful GSOC 2016 project that resulted in a new tool allowing developers to quickly generate a skeleton (scaffolding, template) for a new Moodle plugin. The tool proved to be a helpful helper with significant impact on the quality of Moodle plugins code. This follow-up project aims at further improvements of the skeleton generator. The primary goal is to implement a developer-friendly user interface / front-end editor allowing to configure the plugin's properties (recipe file) easily. The UI should guide the developer through the process of designing and defining the plugin properties and facilitate the whole process.

• We require prospective students to make an attempt at fixing at least 1 issue in the Moodle tracker before their proposal can be considered. This MUST be completed before your application can be considered valid.

Skills required: PHP + JS

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentor: David Mudrák

Add multi-class capabilities to Moodle's machine learning backends

Moodle includes an analytics API that uses machine learning for binary classification. This is enough for classification problems like "student at risk" vs "student not at risk". We want to expand this API capabilities by supporting multi-class classification, so we could write models like "very low grade", "low grade", "pass", "best student ever".

Tasks:

• Modify the two machine learning backends included in Moodle core to support multi-class classification problems. This includes the PHP ML backend (based on php-ml library) and the Python ML backend (Tensorflow).

Requirement for prospective students:

• We require prospective students to make an attempt at fixing at least 1 issue in the Moodle tracker before their proposal can be considered. This MUST be completed before your application can be considered valid.

Tracker issue: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-58992

Skills required: PHP + Python + basic understanding of machine learning algorithms and TensorFlow

Difficulty level: Medium/High

Possible mentor: David Monllaó

Add regressors to core machine learning backends

Moodle includes an analytics API that uses machine learning for binary classification. This is enough for classification problems like "student at risk" vs "student not at risk". We want to expand this API capabilities to support regression, so we can write models that estimate linear values instead of classes.

Tasks:

• Modify the two machine learning backends included in Moodle core to support regression. This includes the PHP ML backend (based on php-ml library) and the Python ML backend (Tensorflow).

Requirement for prospective students:

• We require prospective students to make an attempt at fixing at least 1 issue in the Moodle tracker before their proposal can be considered. This MUST be completed before your application can be considered valid.

Tracker issue: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-60523

Skills required: PHP + Python + basic understanding of machine learning algorithms and TensorFlow

Difficulty level: Medium/High

Possible mentor: David Monllaó

Attendance password rotation/expiry

The attendance plugin provides the ability for teachers to display a QR code to allow students to take their own attendance, the QR code is currently static for the current session and does not change.

A new process should be implemented that frequently changes the displayed QR code and expires the old QR code, making it difficult for the QR code to be shared outside the session. As part of your project application, please suggest your ideas on how to minimise the impact of server performance while dealing with rotating QR codes.

Requirement for prospective students:

• We require prospective students to make an attempt at fixing at least 1 issue in the Moodle tracker before their proposal can be considered. This MUST be completed before your application can be considered valid.

Tracker issue: https://github.com/danmarsden/moodle-mod_attendance/issues/351

Skills required: PHP

Difficulty level: Medium

Possible mentor: Dan Marsden

See also

• GSOC - describing Moodle's involvement with Google in their Summer of Code program
• Popular new feature and improvement requests in Tracker that can be implemented as plugins