General plugins (Local): Profile field based cohort membership
Moodle core provides a mechanim to manually fill cohorts with users (on Site administration -> Users -> Accounts -> Cohorts). This is fine for small Moodle installations where the cohort members don't change too often and where the Moodle admin has plenty of time to update the cohorts.
Now, larger or fragmented Moodle installations may have the need to manage a large number of cohorts which have a large amount of members and which may also change quite often. Managing cohorts by hand in such scenarios is simply unprofessional overkill - even / particularly if you distribute the work among multiple Moodle admins.
On the other hand these large or fragmented Moodle installations might already have some custom user profile fields which can be leveraged to decide which cohort(s) a user should be a member of. This plugin implements a simple solution to manage cohort memberships based on a users' custom profile field.
Please see README file for details about the usage and features of this plugin.
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Thank you very much for sharing this plugin, it’s great. It would be nice to have it compatible with 3.3 and that combinations of rules could be made.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'combinations of rules'. You can already specify that several rules need to match for a cohort to be allocated by ticking the box 'The next rule must also match, to join this cohort'. If you have several different rules that all allocate the same cohort, then just create each of the rules and they will all allocate the same cohort, if matched.
It is an alternative to the Autoenrol cohort plugin, see https://moodle.org/plugins/pluginversions.php?plugin=auth_mcae, which is compatible up to Moodle 3.0
For the present plugin, contrary to the mcae plugin, cohorts have to be created manually but this give more control. Furthermore, cohorts are updated with the cron job, and not only when the user logs in, which is obviously a nice feature.
But why is it restricted to only custom profile fields. Many information is often stored in one of the default profile fields like country, institution, department. It would be great if I can use also these fields.
there is a simple answer to your question: When we wrote this plugin, we only had the need to process custom profile fields. And as custom profile fields and core profile fields have to be handled differently in code, the work for core profile fields was never done. Additionally, I hope that some day in the future, all core profile fields except firstname, lastname and email will be move to custom profile fields (MDL-28452 would solve the most urgent part for that).
We don't have plans to extend this plugin to core profile fields, but would be willing to review a pull request if someone else would do it in a clean way. That's all I can offer at the moment.
Thanks,
Alex
What are the capabilities connected to this plugin? If I want to create a role with capabilities only to use this plugin, which would they be?
Thanks!
I like this plugin. But why is it limited to custom profile fields?
We need to create cohorts based on standard profile fields like 'institution' and 'department'.
Is it possible to allow also the default fields?
Thanks in advance,
Gerhard
if you scroll up, you will see that you already asked this question in Nov 2017 and that I answered it. Nothing has changed since then.
Thanks,
Alex
I have some problem with the plugin. Cohort remains empty in every cases. Can someone help me with the case?
Thanks