Moodle in English: Plans for Moodle 4.0

Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Tim V. - Wednesday, May 6, 2020, 3:20 PM

Hi everyone,

I'm writing plugins for almost every type. We all know that Moodle 4.0 is coming next year and for my plugins I want to know if there's any plan which interfaces/class or technologies will be removed or replaced in Moodle 4.0. I simply want prevent using something in my plugins now that is already meant to be deprecated. So, for example, will YUI be replaced? Are there any plans about removing/improving or adding a plugin type?

Sure, it's very early to ask regaring such changes. But maybe there're already some information available. The roadmap isn't very detailed about that.

Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Marcus Green - Wednesday, May 6, 2020, 10:05 PM

There has always been a huge amount of notice of deprecation/removal in the past. YUI will not be going away quickly.

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Tim V. - Monday, May 11, 2020, 1:30 PM

Thank you Marcus 🙂 I already read about it, but what about plugin types/interfaces?

Are there any planned "breaking changes"?

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Richard Oelmann - Monday, May 11, 2020, 3:51 PM

Moodle 3.9 is out in a few weeks, Moodle 4.0 is not due until November 2021. While I can appreciate the desire to get ahead of any development you may have planned (and certainly not to build things that could break in 18 months), I do think it's a bit early to ask about 'breaking changes'. Historically, Moodle HQ have worked very hard to maintain backward compatability (some would say too hard?), so I'm sure that if/when such major changes come into the dev pipeline, they will be publicised in tracker and forums as early as possible. HQ are fully aware, I'm sure, of how much the community rely on plugin developers and they will not want to leave those plugins and developers deprecated if they can prevent that.

https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Roadmap#Moodle_4.0_in_November_2021

There are currently no issues on tracker identified for the Moodle4.0 project:
https://tracker.moodle.org/projects/MDL/versions/16898

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Marcus Green - Monday, May 11, 2020, 6:15 PM

It will also depend on what type of plugin you are developing. My focus is Question types and it has been a very, very long time since any new release of Moodle has actually broken one of mine.

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Richard Oelmann - Monday, May 11, 2020, 8:13 PM

As a guess, and based on the declared intention to improve UI/UX, I'd say probably the plugins most likely to need significant work for Moodle4.0 will be themes and course formats - I'm not saying others wont be affected, but those look likely to need the most input from community developers next year. (But emphasis on the 'as a guess'!

)

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Marcus Green - Monday, May 11, 2020, 8:25 PM

I was going to say something similar, but Richard knows much more than me about Themes

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Tim V. - Monday, May 11, 2020, 8:52 PM

I've plugins of almost every type but not all of them are still in use. Most important are auth and repository but I've also many blocks. Finally I'll follow the Jira tracker for version 4.0 and check the changes 🙂

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by David Mudrák - Tuesday, May 12, 2020, 3:48 PM

Well said Richard. Just wanted to add there is https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Deprecation policy that Moodle follows.

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Re: Plans for Moodle 4.0

by Sander Bangma - Tuesday, May 12, 2020, 8:25 AM

Hi All,

It's a great question and I'm really pleased to see everyone thinking ahead! At the moment we're all working hard on the 3.9 release. As you know we plan to take a bit longer for the 4.0 release to allow time for some bigger UI/UX changes that'll improve the experience of Moodle out-of-the-box. So while plans for 4.0 are still shaping up, the main changes will focus on the user experience, rather than major API changes and the like.

If time allows we will of course want to do some maintenance type of activities such a updating older code where we can - if any of these changes will have an impact on the community we will be announcing them and discussing them with the community so there will be ample time to update plugins.

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Plans for Moodle 4.0