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local_oerexchange

The central catalogue and API plugin for the OER Exchange platform — an open-educational-resources sharing platform built on Moodle. Runs on the dedicated Exchange site; teachers share and import through the companion local_oerclient plugin installed on their own Moodle sites.

What it does

• Catalogue: publish, browse, search, structure-preview courses/activities shared from client sites, before anyone imports them.
• Identity: site registration (with admin approval) for client sites, plus a personal account-linking handshake so shares/reviews are attributed to a real Exchange account.
• Licensing: Creative Commons via core's license_manager. An admin chooses which licences sharing may use (Allowed licences setting; the CC set by default) — enforced on every publish path and advertised to client sites, with the licence dropdown preselecting the sharer's remembered choice, the site default licence, or CC BY-SA, in that order.
• Community: adaptation-story reviews, reports, and a moderation queue. A moderator's takedown is a state of its own that the author cannot lift or delete — while a resource is held, its author and co-authors keep every other control but cannot remove it, so a complaint and the record of the takedown survive the person they are about. The queue can restore it.
• A standing list of what is held: a moderator-only report (moderate_hidden.php, linked from the moderation-queue block with a count) lists every resource a moderator has taken down, recording when and by whom, flagging whether the author has changed it since, and carrying a note per resource that every moderator can read and edit. Resources removed automatically as abandoned courseware are not listed — no moderator hid them.
• No user data, and the author is told: every uploaded backup is checked server-side for user data before it can be published — the backup's own recorded setting and an independent inspection of its users.xml, so a client that lies is caught too. A backup carrying user data is refused, the uploaded file is deleted rather than retained, and the reason is shown to the author on their own resource page and reported to their client site. A merely corrupt backup is kept for a moderator to diagnose, and authors see a generic message for it — internal error text can name server paths.
• Author control: authors hide, show, delete, and replace the file of their own resources, and may decline sandbox availability with a reason. The Exchange serves exactly one version per resource — an update supersedes the previous one, keeping the catalogue entry, its link and its reviews.
• Editing what a resource says: an Edit details button on the resource page opens a form for its title, description, subject tags and thumbnail — the counterpart of "Replace the file", which changes the package without touching the entry. The description is a rich-text field. What the form deliberately leaves out is the licence, because changing it would alter the terms people have already imported under, and the type/activity/format fields, which are read from the uploaded package rather than typed by anyone. The thumbnail lives here too rather than on the resource page.
• Starring: any signed-in visitor can star a resource. Starred resources appear under Liked resources on that person's educator profile, provided they have shared something themselves; only published resources are listed, since profiles are public. Stars are stored in Moodle's own favourites subsystem, so they are covered by core's privacy tooling.
• Co-authors: an author can name further authors on anything they have shared, by username or email address, from the resource page. A co-author gets the same rights as the creator — replacing the file, the thumbnail, hiding, deleting, the Try-it opt-out, freshness confirmation, and adding or removing co-authors themselves. The creator is not a co-author record, so nobody they add can remove them. Everyone added is notified and is credited publicly on the resource page. See classes/local/coauthor_manager.php.
• Sharing affordances: share buttons on resource and profile pages, with admin-configurable destinations, each showing its network's logo from Moodle's own bundled FontAwesome (nothing is bundled into the plugin). Every target is a plain link — no third-party script is loaded onto a catalogue page.
• Abandoned courseware (off by default): a nightly check warns the author of any published resource unmaintained past a configurable threshold (default 2 years). The author can update it or press a one-click "Still fresh" button; if neither happens within a configurable grace period (default 60 days), the resource is removed from the catalogue — into the moderation queue's restorable list, never irreversibly. Resources whose author is unreachable are left for human moderators.
• Educator profiles: a shareable profile page per educator (/local_oerexchange/u/{slug}, bio/expertise/badges/metrics/resource grid, plus whichever of the site's additional user profile fields the admin has set to "Visible to everyone"), auto-created on first published resource. Author attribution and a creator/moderator-editable thumbnail on every resource, Open Graph social-preview tags via the Hooks API, a nightly badge-computation task, and a full-deletion-with-tombstone GDPR path (a departing user's shared courseware is genuinely deleted, not just anonymized, while existing links degrade gracefully instead of breaking). See classes/local/profile_manager.php, classes/local/badge_manager.php, and classes/route/controller/.
• Sandbox integration: builds Moodle Playground (in-browser, WASM) trial launch URLs — no server-side trial execution. A trial boots in the language the visitor is reading the catalogue in, where that is not English. See classes/local/sandbox/.

Web services

Custom service local_oerexchange (db/services.php):

Two bootstrap steps have no token yet, so they are plain public endpoints rather than WS functions: register.php (site registration) and link_consume.php (exchange a one-time code for the freshly minted personal token, from the connect.php account-linking handshake).

Because register.php cannot authenticate its caller, it is bounded two ways: registering a URL that already has a pending row returns that row instead of adding another (so a client retrying is harmless), and new registrations site-wide are capped per hour, answering 429 beyond that.

A content area on the catalogue

Show a content area on the catalogue (off by default) puts admin-authored HTML at the top of the Browse OER catalogue page — a welcome message, guidance for contributors, or an announcement. It is a checkbox plus an HTML editor, matching how core handles its own search banner: switching the checkbox off takes the area down without discarding what you wrote.

The content is rendered by the catalogue itself, so it appears on every route to that listing — the plugin's own page, and both ways the catalogue can serve as the site home page (see below). It also shows on an empty catalogue, which is when a welcome message is most useful.

Anonymous access

Browsing the catalogue and viewing a resource page work without logging in. Downloading a resource's .mbz does not, unless Allow anonymous download is turned on — and that setting governs Try it as well, because a sandbox trial downloads the .mbz itself to boot. With the setting off, an anonymous visitor who clicks Try it is sent to the login page.

Show the catalogue to visitors at the site home page (off by default) goes one step further: with it on, a visitor who is not logged in and opens the site home page is served the catalogue at that address, instead of being sent to the login form. The page is rendered in place, so the address bar stays at the site root and searching from there stays there too. forcelogin can remain on — it still applies to every other page; only the front page is opened. The catalogue is not served while the site is in maintenance mode, and /?redirect=0 always reaches the normal front page. Implemented as a \core\hook\after_config listener, which runs before core index.php's require_course_login().

For logged-in users, the plugin adds an OER catalogue option to Moodle's own Appearance → Navigation → Default home page for users (\core_user\hook\extend_default_homepage); core handles that case by redirecting to the catalogue's own address.

A "site key" issued on approval is a real core web service token, minted against a dedicated, non-interactive Moodle account created for that site (local_oerexchange\local\site_manager) — not a custom auth scheme.

Uploading, and knowing what happened next

A share is published asynchronously: the file is stored immediately, and an adhoc task validates the backup on the next cron run before the resource appears in the catalogue. Both upload pages therefore show a progress bar while the file is being sent (course backups here routinely run to hundreds of megabytes, which a plain form post reports to nobody), and then land on the new resource's own page, which says "Checking your upload…" and updates itself to either Published or the rejection reason — no reload, no guesswork. The progress bar is progressive enhancement: with JavaScript off, the same form posts to the same address and the same thing happens, minus the bar.

File size and the sandbox

Resource pages and catalogue cards show each resource's file size, and a resource big enough to make an in-browser trial slow carries a note beside Try it saying so and pointing at Download instead.

Warn about slow trials above (sandboxwarnbytes) sets that threshold. Its default, 50 MiB, is the stock sandbox engine's fast-download budget: below it, a trial fetches the backup with a visible percentage; above it, the engine falls back to a download inside its WebAssembly PHP that reports no progress at all. A 359 MB course measured on the stock budget booted successfully but took 4 minutes 15 seconds, nearly four of them apparently idle. Set it to 0 to never warn.

Keep this in step with your sandbox. The companion oer-sandbox kit can raise that budget when it builds the bundle (OER_FAST_DOWNLOAD_MAX_MB, default 384). If yours is built that way, set this setting to the same number — otherwise the Exchange warns about resources the sandbox now handles quickly. On the reference deployment, raising the budget to 384 MiB took the same 359 MB course from 4 min 15 s to 23.8 seconds, with a percentage throughout.

Never offer a trial above (sandboxmaxbytes, 0 = no limit) is the hard version: above it no Try it button is rendered and a direct link to the trial is refused, with the size and the limit explained in place of the button. It is off by default, because a large trial does work — it is only slow.

Maximum upload size (maxbackupbytes, 500 MB) is the one limit that actually refuses an upload. It is enforced on every publish path, shown on the upload pages, checked in the browser before a large file is sent, and advertised to registered client sites so their share forms can check it first.

Licence display

Show licence codes in capitals (uppercaselicencenames, on by default) chooses whether a resource's licence code reads CC-SA-4.0 or cc-sa-4.0 on resource pages, catalogue cards and the browse block. It is a display setting only: codes are wrapped in <span class="oer-licence-name"> and the capitals come from CSS, so the licence is stored, filtered and advertised to client sites exactly as it was published. The licence filter dropdown keeps the stored spelling regardless. A theme can override the styling with .oer-licence-name--upper { text-transform: unset; }, because plugin stylesheets are emitted before theme CSS.

Requirements

• Moodle 5.0–5.2 ($plugin->supported).
• PHP as required by the target Moodle version.

Installation

Acknowledgments

This plugin's sandbox integration (classes/local/sandbox/) builds launch URLs for Moodle Playground — all of the actual work of running Moodle in a browser (WASM boot, blueprint provisioning, service-worker/bundle machinery) is that project's, not ours; this plugin only constructs a URL for it. Moodle Playground itself runs on WordPress Playground's @php-wasm/web PHP-in-WebAssembly runtime, the foundational piece that makes any of this possible in a browser tab. Deployment of the actual sandbox (building and serving the static bundles) lives in the companion oer-sandbox repo, whose README carries the fuller acknowledgment.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE.