Links Block

The Links block, shown to users as "Learning Resources", gives a Moodle™ site a centrally managed list of web links. An administrator maintains the links in one place, and each link can be shown to everyone or restricted to users whose profile field (institution, department, city, country or description) matches. The block can be placed on courses, the dashboard and the front page, and following a link is recorded through Moodle™'s events API.

The block was originally created by Sean Madden and Stephen Bourget for Goffstown School District in the United States. Ldesign Media adopted the plugin and co-maintains it in the Moodle™ plugins directory, with the original authors and their copyright fully credited.

Our work focused on quality and trust rather than new features. We reviewed the plugin against the Moodle™ coding standards and ran the full Moodle™ Plugin CI suite (code checker, PHPDoc, upgrade savepoints, Mustache and Grunt linting, and the Behat acceptance tests) on a clean Moodle™ 5.x site with PHP 8.3. We also carried out a security-focused review of the capability checks, the link-follow redirect and the profile-based visibility rules.

Where the review surfaced issues (a permission-event validation check that never actually ran, a stray PHP notice on profile-restricted links, and a handful of smaller correctness and documentation fixes), we corrected them and re-ran the full suite to confirm everything stayed green. The result is a small, dependable plugin that installs cleanly on current Moodle™ and PHP releases and behaves predictably.