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
Revision as of 22:23, 28 January 2018 by Dan Marsden (talk | contribs) (add mobile app support for attendance project.)


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 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.

Please consider adopting a plugin seeking a new maintainer. See the Plugins adoption programme.

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.

Pusher integration for HTML5 push notifications

Moodle supports message output plugins. By adding a plugin for pusher.com and a Javascript service worker to listen for push notifications, we can have realtime HTML5 notifications on all platforms.

Skills required: Javascript (JQuery, AMD), PHP
Difficulty level: Medium

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.

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

Advanced Grading in Forums

Finish the work required to add the advanced grading feature to the Moodle forum activity. This builds on some existing work available at MDL-31860

Deliverables:

  • Update existing patch to work on latest master branch (existing patch based on an early release of 2.9)
  • Modify the forum grading so that it pushes 2 grade areas (or 3 including ratings) into the gradebook instead of a single grade.
  • Improve interface that allows overall forum participation grading.
  • Behat tests for all new functionality.
  • The code should pass 100% of the Moodle codechecking tools to ensure the code meets with Moodle Guidelines.

Extra 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 - on top of this you must also attempt to convert one existing QA test into a Behat test. This MUST be completed before your application can be considered valid.
Skills required: PHP
Difficulty level: Medium
Possible mentor: Dan Marsden

Improve end-to-end testing in the Mobile app

Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would.

There are almost 40 e2e tests in the Mobile app, right now tests only works in old versions of Node and Protractor.

The aim of this project is to upgrade the Node, Protractor, Selenium and the rest of dependencies to be able to run tests in both a browser and in real devices via external systems like Saucelabs.

Tasks:

  • Upgrade the Node, Protractor and dependencies versions to be able to run tests in modern environments.
  • Configure the app to be able to be launched in Saucelabs via Travis (if possible).
  • Fix existing tests that are failing
  • Update Moodle Mobile documentation with new instructions for setting up both environments.
Skills required: Javascript (AngularJS)
Difficulty level: Medium
Possible mentor: Juan Leyva

Migrate Moodle Mobile publishing scripts to Gulp tasks

Right now the Mobile app uses several scripts ([see here https://github.com/moodlehq/moodlemobile-scripts]) for common tasks related to publishing.

Those scripts should be migrated to Gulp tasks so they are available among the other tasks already implemented.

Tasks:

  • Migrate the prepare-release-version.sh script to gulp task
  • Migrate the prepare-release-integration.sh script to gulp task
  • Improve previous scripts to compile the resulting app via Phonegap Build API
  • Migrate the rest of scripts that synchronizes language translations
Skills required: Javascript
Difficulty level: Medium
Possible mentor: Juan Leyva

Add Mobile app support to Attendance plugin

A new version of the Moodle Mobile app will be finished in May 2018 - This will provide a simpler way for plugins to add support for the Mobile app. Draft spec is available here https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=361230

Minimum requirements for this would involve the ability for teachers and students to take attendance, and for students to view their reports.

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

See also