Links block for Moodle™

What does the Links block do?

The Links block, shown inside Moodle™ as Learning Resources, makes it possible to manage relevant web links centrally. Links no longer need to be maintained separately in courses or on different pages.

For audience targeting, an administrator can use a standard profile field, such as institution, department, city, country or description. Per link you can then decide whether it is visible to everyone or only to users with a specific value in that profile field.

This makes the block well suited for Moodle™ environments where multiple organisations, locations or departments share the same learning environment but each need to see their own resources, applications or information.

The block can be used on course pages, the dashboard and the front page, depending on the capabilities of the Moodle™ theme in use. Adding, changing, deleting and following links is logged through the Moodle™ events API.

Maintenance by Ldesign Media

The Links block was originally developed by Sean Madden and later maintained and extended by Stephen Bourget for Goffstown School District in the United States.

Ldesign Media has taken over maintenance of the plugin and is now lead maintainer in the official Moodle Marketplace. The original credits and copyrights remain in place.

When taking over, we thoroughly reviewed the code and made it suitable for current Moodle™ versions. Among other things, we:

• tested the plugin against the Moodle™ Coding Style
• ran the Moodle Plugin CI checks and acceptance tests
• reviewed capability checks and profile-based visibility
• checked the redirect when following external links
• fixed the validation and correctness issues we found
• verified compatibility with current PHP and Moodle™ versions

This keeps an existing open-source plugin available to the Moodle™ community, ready to be used on modern Moodle™ installations.