...or what's the best practice this week?
I want to write a page that isn't a report (it sets up some parameters for external enrolments) that is accessed from within a course (the settings are local to each course). Where does one put such a thing in 2.4? Also, is it possible from a plugin to add to the Course Settings or, again, is there a better way to handle this?
As far as I know, the only plugin types that can add to the course settings are local plugins. It has been a bit of a shift for us as in 1.9 we used to try to avoid local plugins at all costs and crowbar the functionality into one of the standard plugin types, but now it's the other way round - we tend to go to local plugins first.
The documentation still implies that local plugins are a fallback when you can't find another plugin type to do what you want, so using local plugins for this isn't necessarily good practice (and I suspect some people might call it bad practice) but it'll certainly work better than any of the other types for what you're trying to do.
The documentation still implies that local plugins are a fallback when you can't find another plugin type to do what you want, so using local plugins for this isn't necessarily good practice (and I suspect some people might call it bad practice) but it'll certainly work better than any of the other types for what you're trying to do.
They were originally, but they have evolved. As Martin decalred in MDL-38322:
Henceforth let it be known throughout the land that /local is actually a stupid name for our "generic plugin" type and that we encourage people to use it when no better plugin type fits the purpose.
At the OU, we abuse report plugins for this. E.g. https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=report_editdates
Yes - that's what I do too but I've been starting to feel guilty about it. A lot of things say "don't use reports for activities that change stuff".
I assuage my guilt by thinking that the only mistake was to call the plugin type 'report'. If only we had called them 'tool' plugins, then we cuold have got rid of admin/tool and local plugins. After all, a report is just one type of tool.