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tiny_sheetmusic

The sheet-music authoring plugin for Moodle's TinyMCE editor. It adds a toolbar button and an Insert menu item that open the score editor, and writes the resulting score into the HTML field in the suite's stored-content form.

This is one of three plugins in the sheetmusic suite:

Why a TinyMCE subplugin

A tiny_* subplugin is handed the live context in both of its PHP entry points, so score authoring can be switched on for music courses and activities without being forced on the whole site. An editor_* plugin has no supported way to do that.

Availability is controlled by the capability tiny/sheetmusic:use, allowed for all authenticated users by default — students answer notation exercises with the same editor their teachers set them in. Remove it from a role, or override it in a context, to take the button away there.

Requirements

• Moodle 4.5 or later.
• local_sheetmusic 2026082100 or later. This is a hard dependency: the engine is where the notation code lives.
• The TinyMCE editor. editor_tiny supports FORMAT_HTML only, so score authoring is available only in HTML-format fields.

filter_sheetmusic is not a hard dependency, but without it a score will be stored and never displayed as notation. The plugin checks whether the filter is active in the current context and says so when it is not.

What the dialogue does

The dialogue is this plugin's; the editing surface inside it is local_sheetmusic/editor, the engine's public editing module. That split is deliberate — the modal, the buttons, the author-facing warnings and everything that touches the HTML field live here, and nothing that understands notation does.

• Insert. Write ABC, watch it engrave as you type, press Insert score. What lands in the field is a <pre class="sheetmusic sheetmusic-abc"> holding the source as entity-encoded text. A score that does not engrave cannot be inserted: the dialogue stays open and says why.
• Edit. Click a score already in the field and the same dialogue reopens with its source. Scores are found by the sheetmusic marker class alone, never by what the display filter makes of them.
• Import. ABC, MusicXML (.xml, .musicxml, .mxl) and MIDI. MIDI import is a guess and is presented as one: the dialogue opens its limits, lists everything the import had to assume, and gives you grid, time signature, key and transposition controls to correct it before anything reaches your page.
• Export. SVG, PNG, PDF and MIDI, from whatever is currently in the editor.

Status

Beta. Authoring, editing, import and export work, as do point-and-click and keyboard note entry: the notes tab is the default, and the ABC source remains available on its own tab with a live preview. The preview and saved scores can be played back, with a speed control (playback comes from local_sheetmusic, and a site administrator can turn it off there). MIDI-keyboard input and Braille output are a later phase.

Design documents

Comments in this plugin refer to DESIGN.md, RELATIONS.md and the P0-FINDINGS-* notes by bare name. Those are the sheet music suite's development records and are deliberately not shipped inside the plugin: they cover all three plugins together and change on a different rhythm from the code. RELATIONS.md in particular is the normative contract between the plugins - the stored <pre class="sheetmusic sheetmusic-abc"> format, the engine's public module API, and the editor and filter coupling - and is the document to read before changing either side of a boundary.

They are kept with the suite's development documentation alongside the source repositories rather than in this one.

Licence

GPL v3 or later.