Open LMS Open-Source Code Drop: Meet Our New Plugins!

As we set forth on our Open Roadmap Project - to make our Moodle™ enhancements and modules freely available for all admins and L&D professionals to freely access, modify, and distribute - Open LMS is excited to announce the plugins that are available since our latest code drop on March 17, 2021.

These Moodle™-based plugins are now freely available to the open source community and our valued Open LMS clients:

Liquidus

By enabling and configuring this plugin with an Analytics account, such as Keen, Segment, or Google, admins will be able to track different usage information from their Open LMS / Moodle™ platform. Some of the usage information you can track includes:

• User information. Anonymously Track where the user is connecting from, with which type of device, roles, etc.
• Plugin usage. Track which active plugins on your platform are being used.
• Configuration. For example, you can enable tracking from Google Analytics.

Find them under Plugins > Local plugins > Liquidus.

Theme Assets

Theme assets is a plugin that enables you to add several types of files to the platform. These files are not linked to a specific theme, course, or category. Here are some use cases for admins to customize their theme:

• Upload your own CSS style sheets and font files, and call them via URL in the Additional HTML site, in order to customize your theme and user experience.
• Upload images and gif animations to create unique content and link it to your courses or general sites.
• Add HTML files and create custom sites on your platform.

Drift

Drift plugin allows institutions and organizations to easily integrate a Drift conversational playbook widget into their Moodle™ platforms to provide information to their site admins.

The Drift integration plugin connects with your Drift account and could render any bot or conversational playbook in the platform. This is targeted to be shown just for administrators, who have the ability to opt-out via profile settings.

Single Sign-On via JWT

This plugin gives the ability to use a signed JSON Web token (JWT), generated using a shared secret, to log into your LMS. The secret key is what is used to generate a signed JWT that you put in your cookie. By setting the cookie/parameter name in the plugin, it will expect the signed JWT to be in the cookie/parameter name specified. This is the minimum information required for the plugin to work on your LMS.

And here’s some additional details about new code Open LMS dropped in our first release (and mentioned in this blog post):

Course Completion Restore

Course completion restore allows course completions to be imported into Moodle™.

Import Completion

This code allows you to create a real time backup of course completions that can be restored if course completions are changed or deleted.

Learnbook Theme

The Learnbook Theme was built as a child theme of Boost, perfect for organisational learning.

Snap Feeds

The Open LMS team has developed a new block called the Snap feeds block, which uses Snap theme's advanced feeds API to present users with their upcoming deadlines and latest forum posts.

This block depends on the Snap theme, therefore in order for it to work correctly, the platform should have Snap enabled (even if it is not in use). The block works in Boost and Classic.The block currently supports 2 feed types, deadlines, and forum posts.This block can be enabled on the site front page and the My page. Within a course, the block can be added and the feed type available is Deadlines.

Resque File Converter

This plugin converts files using Unoconv, but rather than assuming that the front end servers will have Unoconv, it uses Redis to queue conversions for worker machines to pickup and actually convert.

You can find all of the code releases and product notes in the Open LMS Github repository here.

The Open LMS development team has been working extremely hard to make plugins beneficial and impactful for all LMS admins. Join our community forum and stay tuned as we drop new code for all admins to use and enjoy. You can learn more about our bi-weekly code drops, as well as the rest of our product roadmap, by joining the “Open LMS Open Roadmap & Suggestion Forum“ in the Open LMS Community.

For questions or to learn more about these latest plugins, feel free to contact us or check out the video below.