Moodle Healthcheck – Making everyday admin tasks easier

January 1, 1970 in Moodle 1.9 Development

Every Moodle administrator/developer has daily tasks that they perform.

Although many jobs can be automated during the cron there are often small jobs to do that can accumitively take up a lot of time.
I needed a to-do list system that would collate all my daily Moodle tasks and display them on one page.

One of the tasks we do each day is to check for new staff members and enrol them onto the Staff Intranet course. I required a way of checking this.

Occasionally we get new user accounts with a blank firstname or blank surname. This happens when LDAP does not contain any user information only the student ID number. I often check the database for blank users but again I required a way of collating all these checks.

I also check for duplicate idnumbers in the database and required a system to report back such duplicates.

This is how the Moodle Healthcheck script was born.

I leave the page open in a new tab in my browser and it automatically refreshes every 60 seconds. A sound is played through my speakers to indicate which action requires attention.

Although I could automate this entirely so new staff members are automatically enrolled via the script this is much more fun!

I will continue expanding the Moodle Health Check script to add more and more features until it will eventually become a dashboard highlighting any daily Moodle errors and jobs that need doing. A way of sending an SMS message to me would also be useful when I am away from the office.

493 Comments »