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Installing into Moodle

How administrators can install and verify the Scaffold 0.1.2 Moodle activity.

This page is for the person installing scaffold into Moodle. It assumes you administer a Moodle site and have site administration access.

The scaffold Moodle plugin is a native activity module (mod_scaffold). Educators add it to a course as a regular activity; learners see the rendered page; grades flow through Moodle’s gradebook.

What you need

  • A Moodle 4.5 or later site you administer.
  • A working Moodle cron process.
  • Site administration access.

Public package status

Scaffold 0.1.2 is available as the versioned mod_scaffold-0.1.2.zip attached to the Scaffold 0.1.2 GitHub prerelease.

The plugin has been submitted to Moodle Marketplace and is awaiting review; it is not available through Marketplace yet. Until approval, the versioned GitHub release ZIP is the official installation route. Do not download GitHub’s automatically generated Source code archives: they are repository snapshots, not Moodle plugin packages.

Scaffold is currently alpha software. Evaluate it in a non-production environment before using it with live learners.

Install Scaffold 0.1.2

Download mod_scaffold-0.1.2.zip. Do not rename or rebuild it.

  1. Sign in to Moodle as a site administrator.
  2. Open Site administration → Plugins → Install plugins.
  3. Upload the versioned Scaffold ZIP and review Moodle’s validation report.
  4. Continue through the database upgrade when validation succeeds.

For a manual installation, extract the same package as <moodle>/mod/scaffold, then visit Site administration → Notifications or run:

php admin/cli/upgrade.php --non-interactive

After the Marketplace listing is approved, installation through Marketplace will become the primary route and GitHub will remain the versioned fallback.

Verify the installation

Open Site administration → Plugins → Plugins overview, find Scaffold (mod_scaffold), and confirm that its release matches the version you installed: 0.1.2.

Also confirm that Scaffold appears in the activity chooser and that Moodle cron is running. Release 0.1.2 was smoke-tested on Moodle 5.2.1+ (Build 20260722), PHP 8.3.32, and PostgreSQL 16 with DEBUG_DEVELOPER clean. The declared compatibility range is Moodle 4.5, 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2.

Add it to a course

In a Moodle course, turn on edit mode, open the activity chooser, and pick Scaffold. Configure the activity the same way as any other Moodle activity (name, intro, grade settings). Save.

Authors edit through scaffold’s dedicated authoring view. Learners see the learner view when they open the activity.

Where the data lives

Scaffold stores its data in Moodle tables created by the plugin’s database schema; it does not send learner records to a separate Scaffold service. Authored content, learner-safe content, assessment contracts, and grade configuration belong to the activity. Assessment state, learner-activity state, and grade-publication status are separate per-user records.

The plugin uses Moodle’s standard APIs:

  • Files go through Moodle’s File API in the media file area for any uploaded blocks or attachments.
  • Learner actions and submissions use Moodle external functions called through core/ajax; accepted state is saved in the plugin’s per-user records.
  • Official grades are written through Moodle’s gradebook API.
  • Learning records are accepted through Moodle’s xAPI subsystem and converted into Moodle events. Scaffold does not send them to a separate Scaffold service or LRS. See Learning records and xAPI.

You see the result in the Moodle gradebook in the same place you’d see any other graded activity.

Privacy and backups

Scaffold uses Moodle’s standard privacy and backup tools. Privacy requests can export or delete a learner’s Scaffold answers, activity progress, and grade-publication status without removing the course activity or its media.

Moodle backups always include the Scaffold activity and its media. Learner data is included only when the backup includes enrolled users.

Scaffold does not keep a separate copy of this data. Your institution manages its retention through Moodle.

Adapter behaviour worth knowing

  • Single author per page. Real-time collaboration is disabled in the Moodle adapter; the activity is treated as a single-author surface.
  • Server-side grading. Submissions are graded server-side through the external functions; browser-side responses don’t decide the grade.
  • Plugin maturity. The current release of mod_scaffold is marked as alpha. We expect bug reports and the upgrade path may involve breaking changes during this stage.
  • Scheduled work. Moodle cron reconciles expired quizzes and retries pending grade publication. Both scheduled tasks are configured to run every five minutes.

Upgrade or remove Scaffold

Before an upgrade, back up the Moodle database and dataroot and read the release notes. Install the new versioned ZIP over the existing mod/scaffold directory, complete Moodle’s database upgrade, and verify the installed version and cron status.

Before uninstalling, make any required course and site backups. Remove the plugin through Moodle’s plugin administration interface before deleting the mod/scaffold directory.

What’s next