How can I tell which plugins are needed by a given course? The question presented itself to me in two different scenarios this week:
Scenario 1:
We maintain an edit server for course development and testing, and a live server for student activity. Courses are generally started on the edit site, then promoted to live when the teacher determines the course is ready. As a system admin, I create the courses and install plugins as requested by the teachers.
I might install Plugin A for Teacher X, but that's no guarantee that Teacher X used it in her course. Furthermore, once it's on the edit server it is available to everyone. (In fact, we usually send out emails to let people know that new plugins are available.) So maybe Teachers Y and Z incorporate it into their courses. I wouldn't know; the teachers are not required to report this to me, and if they were, I would probably tell them not to bother. I dislike nanomanagement.
But now it's time to migrate a course from the edit to live server, and the teacher won't remember what optional plugins were used in her course. I can do a backup on edit and a restore on live, but how can I tell what plugins need to come along with the course? Our edit server has many more plugins than our live server. What happens to content that was created with an optional plugin if you try to restore a course that used it on a Moodle installation that doesn't have it? But better still, is there a way to quert Moodle to find out what plugins a given course requires?
We're on 2.2.4, if that affects the way this can be done.
Scenario 2:
We have some courses in a hosted Moodle 1.9 environment. We want to upgrade them to Moodle 2.2 and move them to our self-hosted server. This scenario has the same need at the first, in that I have to figure out which plugins are used by courses vs. which are installed and unused, but has the extra effort of a Moodle upgrade and finding 2.2 equivalents for the plugins that are in use.
Any suggestions or guidance is much appreciated!
Thanks!
Janine Hempy