linkedin badge

You have earned a badge and now want to post it on your profile on LinkedIn to show it off. Easy right?

Well, no. LinkedIn doesn’t have an easy API to posting external images or pages, but they do have a ‘add certification’ custom popup that you can include into a page that allows you to post the image – as long as the image is accessible to the general (un-authenticated) internet. That isn’t something Moodle lets you do – it makes the badge information page publically accessible but the badge itself is rendered at a tiny size (internally hard-coded too).

moodle is suposedly a modular environment that lets you extend and override a whole bunch of pages and areas using custom php or local plugins. except for the Badge page which is linked from the user profile page – it is effectively hard coded and isn’t part of the normal page render cycle. To change the Badge page you have to use a combination of two features:

  • custom scripts
  • overridden renderer in your theme

This is because a local plugin can’t override the renderer used by this page. So if you already have a custom theme, you have to modify it to patch in a renderer for the badge page and render the standard page plus your own modifications.

I’ve added a github repository which describes how to make the required changes and come sample code. unfortuantely I can’t supply a standalone plugin for just showing the button because of the way both linkedin and moodle have structured their systems.

Nosey Notifications

Leverages Moodle events for some common events within courses such as enrolling, unenrolling, completing activities and courses, creating updating and deleting courses. It notifies an external URL and posts the record that changed.

SQL Job

A local plugin for executing artbitary SQL statements (not just SELECT’s) through the cron. Relies on the DB permissions to execute/insert to be set for the moodle db user.

Restore All MBZ

A command-line admin script to restore all course backups (*.mbz) in a particular folder to multiple categories. It tries to match to the category specified within the backup file, creating them if necessary.

Activity Completions via CSV

Ever needed to complete a bunch of users who studied externally? That’s what this admin tool is for. It can manually enrol users if need be.

You can import completion results (as overrides) for any activity type (including custom plugins) using a simple CSV format.

You can also run this from the CLI – for externally scheduled result transfers or similar advanced functionality.

Clone Category

This plugin will backup and restore all courses in a given category over to a new category. It will modify the idnumber field to ensure new courses have a unique value.

This takes the tedium out of re-versioning a set of courses for a new condition – such as a semester.