Note:

If you want to create a new page for developers, you should create it on the Moodle Developer Resource site.

Projects for new developers

From MoodleDocs


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.

Self-assessment activity using the question bank

The basic idea is that the teacher sets up a bank of questions organised into categories. Then the student can then choose what questions they want to practice when. This is about student-centred learning based on the capabilities of the Moodle question bank.

The idea is explained in more detail in [http://tjhunt.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-i-want-to-build-next.html this blog post. (Note that I am not going to get time to do this myself!)

If you are interested in working on this, there is still a lot of work to do to decide a scope for the project. I think it is important to find a minimal 'version 1.0' set of functionality that can be build as a short project that leads to a completely working activity. Then we can add more features to that already-working core.

Skills required: PHP
Difficulty level: Medium
Possible mentor: Tim Hunt


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!
Skills required: PHP & JavaScript
Difficulty level: Medium - Hard
Possible mentors: Tim Hunt

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.


Role assigning tool

Develop a tool for easily assigning a role to a user in many places, for example, enrol a student in several courses.

Skills required: PHP
Difficulty level: Medium
Mentors: Rossiani Wijaya

For further details see:


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: Dan Poltawski

For further details see:

Implement HTML5 support 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 API is https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Form_API.

New HTML5 attributes and elements are at http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/forms/html5forms/

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 (modules edit settings forms, course settings forms, user forms ...).

Some related issues:

Skills required: HTML5, PHP, JavaScript
Difficulty level: Hard
Possible mentor: Aparup Banerjee

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 users displayed; and
  • JS popups - broken and inefficient in places, modal + focus issues.

It would be good if we could write a new interface which offers:

  • dynamic filters (using JS)
  • pagination
  • filter by letter (similar to mod_assign grading page)
  • improved/rewritten JS popups
Skills required: PHP & JavaScript [YUI]
Difficulty level: Medium
Possible mentors: Andrew Nicols

SCORM

There are various SCORM related projects I'd be interested in mentoring for GSOC in 2013.

  • SCORM 2004 - this will build on previous GSOC project work improving SCORM 2004 support.
  • SCORM player rewrite - the player currently uses YUI2 code - it should be converted to YUI3 and improved maybe adding an HTML5 version of the player?
  • SCORM reports - there are currently 3 SCORM reports - ideas on new report plugins would be considered as possible projects.
  • Improve file linking support (MDL-25879)
Skills required: PHP, JavaScript
Difficulty level: Medium -> Hard
Possible mentor: Dan Marsden

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 Behat's new features user interface

Right now we list the available steps definitions and we have a form to filter them. Would be good to allow feature files to be created directly from this page filling a textarea field with the selected steps from the list, adding a template in some cases to reduce human errors when writting new feature files, this template would depend on the arguments expected by the step.

Check the current user interface on the latest Moodle 2.5 development version (https://github.com/moodle/moodle, master branch) going to Site administration block -> Development -> Acceptance testing

Mockup of how could it look like: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/File:GSOC_2013_acceptance_test_new_ui_proposal.png

Skills required: Javascript & PHP (also Git or others source version control systems)
Difficulty level: Easy - Medium
Possible mentor: David Monllaó

In future this files would be also executed, this needs to be considered during design/development, but would not be part of this project. Please, before applying be sure to read about the Behat - Moodle integration (https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Acceptance_testing) 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

Portfolio plugin for Evernote

It would be nice to provide students with a Portfolio plugin to export information from Moodle straight to their Evernote account. The Evernote notes system is quite flexible and allows for content and attachments to be included together, unlike other portfolios systems that Moodle can export to.

This involves:

  • communicating with an external API,
  • gathering different types of content,
  • reformatting the content together into a format compatible with Evernote, and
  • exporting this to Evernote.
Skills required: PHP (also Git or others source version control systems)
Difficulty level: Medium
Possible mentor: Frédéric Massart

See also

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