Moodle Plugins directory: Outage manager | Moodle.org

Outage manager
Authentication ::: auth_outage
Maintained by
Catalyst IT,
Brendan Heywood
A plugin to manage outage periods, such as scheduled maintenance, including CLI tools to embed in your scripting.
Latest release:
459 sites
210 downloads
45 fans
Current versions available: 3
This is a Moodle plugin which makes the student experience of planned outages nicer, and provides extra tools for administrators and testers that help before and after the outage window.
The main idea is that instead of an outage being a very boolean on/off situation, this plugin creates the concept of graduated outages where at predefined times before an outage and after, different levels of warning and access can be provided to students and testers letting them know what is about to happen and why.
If you need support for Moodle 2.x ...
... you can still use this plugin but you will need to manually set up an additional local plugin contained, for more information please refer to: https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-local_outage
Contributors
Catalyst IT (Lead maintainer)
Brendan Heywood
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them
I will need to doublecheck the autostart mode part but basically admins could not even log onto the moodle instance. If that is intentional, how does an admin do any work within the GUI while in maintenance mode? I will really need to get back into github as your not the first person that has asked me to open an issue there. I will try to make time this weekend and report the info.
I also found that the plugin locks admins out of the site during the outage. This meant there was no way for admins to work in Moodle behind maintenance mode or to disable maintenance mode. I restored access by changing the "auth" database setting in the mdl_config table from "outage" to "manual".
May only affect our site/theme, but also noticed that during the warning period the top-bar (i.e. with "My Courses", profile menu etc) didn't display. We're running Essential theme & latest version of Moodle.
The plugin concept is great, but these two issues mean we can't use it yet.
Happy to provide any details that would be helpful in resolving the two issues, just let me know. I used autostart for the outage.
Thanks
The core moodle cli maintenance mode locks everyone out, this isn't something we can, or would, change. However we are working on a new feature to be released soon which lets testers from certain ip ranges in during the shoulder of the outage period but while strict maintenance mode is no longer on. The typical use case being you start the outage, then enter cli maint mode, do the upgrade, turn off maint mode, at which point the testers can do their work while the students still see the outage message, then when the testers are happy the outage is finished and everyone can see moodle again.
Also re the header of your theme not appearing, there is also a new config setting shortly to be released allowing css tweaks to adapt to any theme. The default css works in the default moodle bootstrap theme.
cheers
Brendan
I created the issue https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-auth_outage/issues/127 so we can perform some testing before marking it compatible with newer Moodles. It seems like our testing goes up to Moodle 3.3 but I need to confirm that.
Thank you for the information
Daniel
We just implemented this plugin in our Moodle 3.7+ (Build: 20190628) install. The only customization we have implemented is changing the messageoutageongoing language string to better reflect our standards.
The plugin functions well except for the following:
Using the standard Boost or Classic themes in 3.7+ the Outage banner is not responsive. Specifically, the Outage Info link is pushed outside the bounds of the outage banner.
Exception - Unsupported operand types: array + string
When will this be ready or should I rather uninstall it?
But, could I point one interesting feature that will make it wonderful? The ability to define one (or several, but one is fine for me) recurring outage, i.e. I want to define one outage at 4:00 EVERY day.
Anyway it's a superb plugin.
Thanks!
Paris
Any help would be appreciated.