Many activity modules provide the teacher with many options when setting up an activity. Not all the options are needed in all schools though and it would therefore be good if the Moodle administrator could choose default settings for some of the options and then hide them form the teachers. It will make Moodle easier to use for teachers.
I have implemented such a scheme in the quiz module in Moodle 1.5dev where the admin now can set and fix defaults for all quiz options (except the dates) on the quiz module config page. Other modules may want to do something similar.
The defaults and the flags whether options should be fixed for the teacher are stored in the config table. I have also extended the mechanism whereby Moodle sets up initial defaults by allowing each module to provide its own defaults.php similar to the one in lib/defaults.php.
My scheme should be improved by giving the teacher a button "Show advanced options" which will show the options if the teacher really wants them. This will be easy to do and I probably will do this for the quiz module soon.