cwarwicker / moodle-block_quick_course

Quick Course search block for Moodle

Quick Course Search

The quick_course block allows you to search quickly for courses, without having to go through the Moodle course interface.

• As site admin or user with block/quick_course:searchall capability - Search all courses in the site
• As a user with block/quick_course:search capability - Search all courses you are enrolled to, including any courses in categories you are category enrolled to.

Requirements

Moodle 3.4+

Screenshots

These screenshots were taken on a plain Moodle installation with no fancy theme installed. Appearances may vary slightly depending on your theme.

The Block:

The block with some search results:

Search results expanded to see extra links:

The course relationships page, showing a parent (meta) course and its child relationships:

The course relationships page, showing a child course and its parent (meta) relationships:

Installation

From github:

1. Download the latest version of the plugin from the Releases page.
2. Extract the directory from the zip file and rename it to 'quick_course' if it is not already named as such.
3. Place the 'quick_course' folder into your Moodle site's /blocks/ directory.
4. Run the Moodle upgrade process either through the web interface or command line.
5. Add the block to a page and start using it

License

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0

Support

If you need any help using the block, or wish to report a bug or feature request, please use the issue tracking system: https://github.com/cwarwicker/moodle-block_quick_course/issues

moodle-block_quick_course's Issues

settings should be wrapped in if ($ADMIN->fulltree) {

settings.php is included in a lot of places - it improves efficiency to wrap your settings in a call to:
if ($ADMIN->fulltree) {

see other block settings.php files for examples.

jQuery not required in page, can cause $ is not defined error and breaks javascript functionality

just add

$this->page->requires->jquery();

in block_quick_course.php

Privacy API

Moodle uses a privacy API for GDPR compliance to allow plugins to specify how they deal with user data. It doesn't look like your plugin stores user data so you should be able to implement the simple null provider.

Sites that use continuous integration processes will not be able to use your plugin because Moodle runs unit tests which check to see if all extra plugins include the privacy class.

More information on the privacy class is here:
https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Privacy_API

please note this is not a block for approval in the plugins db at this stage.

watch camel case use

Moodle uses sentence case - stuff like:
$string['participants'] = 'View Course Participants';

should probably be :
$string['participants'] = 'View course participants';

This does not block approval in the plugins db.

Sub category courses not searchable

If user is enrolled to Cat A, with Cat A.1 below it. Only searches courses directly in Cat A, not Cat A.1 or below.

please add more screenshots to plugins db entry

Would be good to see a screenshot of your "relationships" page in the plugins db!

consider adding travis-ci support

Some of the tests run by the Moodle.org plugins db can be run via travis-ci on each commit in your github repo. Enabling Travis integration helps you to make sure future changes to your plugin will continue to follow the guidelines.

More information on this is here:
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=323384

but the short version:
grab this file:
https://github.com/moodlerooms/moodle-plugin-ci/blob/master/.travis.dist.yml
rename it as .travis.yml and put in the root of your github directory.
Go to:
https://travis-ci.org/profile/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME
Flick the switch for this repo.

then on every commit you make to github it will fire off a request to travis to run the tests in .travis.yml and will give you traffic lights beside each commit and generate a report.

something else you might want to change:
in .travis.yml the default file has this line:

env:
global:

MOODLE_BRANCH=MOODLE_35_STABLE
you might want to add other branches to that list - so you might want to change it something like:

env:
global:
MOODLE_BRANCH=MOODLE_35_STABLE
MOODLE_BRANCH=MOODLE_36_STABLE
MOODLE_BRANCH=MOODLE_37_STABLE

Check permissions before showing course in results

Although the block can only be used by users who are of the teacher archetype in the given context, not all teachers can view all courses. So we need to check this before displaying. The core_course_search_courses webservice should help with this