General developer forum

I second that, as do many teachers. What is needed is a sort of intermediary state for resources where they are "directly invisible" to students but "available" for linking to them by teachers.
This feature would be very useful when building courses in Moodle.
Joseph

We have this feature in OU Moodle. It is called 'stealth mode'. Resources that are 'stealthed' are visible in the menu only when editing is turned on. (Hidden items in default Moodle display 'all the time' to people who have the capability to see them, but we changed this in general to use the editing state instead, because it was unhelpful to our users.)

When editing is turned on, stealthed items appear with a short message in small text after each one that says they are accessible but not visible to students.

In the database this is implemented as a new 'stealth' column in mdl_course_modules. We didn't reuse the 'visible' column because that would have required potential changes to other areas of code and security-sensitive code (as 'visible' being false triggers security protections).

We then changed the standard module settings bit to add a 'stealth mode' control, which appears as an additional dropdown.

We are entirely happy to contribute this working and well-tested code to the community if Martin D will accept it as-is (in moodle HEAD). I suspect he won't.

In a similar vein we also added 'livedate' and 'removedate' columns which allow for resources that appear on a particular date, or after it. These are stored in course_modules as integer offset in days from start of course (which means when you backup and restore to a different date they still work). These options, too, get added to the standard module update forms. [We haven't fully implemented these from the security point of view i.e. in most modules it is still possible to access the data if you guess the URL, even if the date isn't passed.]

Again, we'd be happy to contribute these if Martin D will accept as-is.

Assuming that moodle.com wouldn't accept our changes the way we've done them, we would probably* be willing to redo them to a mutually-agreed format which we could then commit to core. However this would need to wait until our next available unscheduled time, which starts in November.

--sam

* 'Probably' means I think we should do it but I don't actually control how our time is scheduled. However I also think I could get it through no problem, so.