Blocks administration

Location: Administration > Modules > Blocks

Blocks administration

The blocks administration page enables administrators to manage installed blocks and their settings.

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 global search (unless you have enabled the global search feature in Administration > Miscellaneous > Experimental), mentees (unless you have added a mentor role) and network servers (unless you are using Moodle Networking).

Instances

The blocks page also lists the number of instance for each block. Clicking on a number results in the list of courses containing that block being displayed.

Multiple blocks

Some blocks, such as the HTML block, can be used more than once on a course page. You can choose whether or not to allow this by clicking the change link in the Multiple column.

Block deletion

Any block can be deleted using the link in the delete column. There is no reason for standard blocks to be deleted, however non-standard blocks may need to be deleted before upgrading.

Note: To delete a block completely, in addition to deleting 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

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

• Courses block settings
• Online Users block settings
• Remote RSS Feeds block settings

Blocks (administrator) list

In edit mode, a Moodle page can show a block which contains a list of blocks that are available to add in that context for a role. There are special blocks only available to Administrator.

Examples of context include a Site's front page or a Course's main page and more recently to include a block in an activity module. Some blocks only appear once in a specific context. Only being able to show one site administration block on the main page. A few teacher blocks are available to administrators in their contextual pull down menu.

The list below has the administrator blocks shown in bold:

Activities block Admin bookmarks block Blogs Menu Blogs Tags Calendar Course/Site description links to Site Front Page settings or Course settings Courses Global Search block HTML Latest News block Loan Calculator (from 1.6 onwards) Main menu block Login Mentees block (from 1.8 onwards) Messages Network Servers block People block Random Glossary Entry Recent Activity block Remote RSS Feeds Search Forums Site Administration Upcoming Events block Sticky blocks

Example of a Blocks pulldown menu for Administrators

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 Modules and plugins database.

Warning: Be aware that contributed blocks may have quality issues, may not work correctly, and may not work when you upgrade Moodle. You should test them thoroughly before using them and be prepared to uninstall them before upgrading.

See also

• Block layout
• Installing contributed modules or plugins