Real-world Moodle plugin development rarely looks like the documentation suggests — especially when you’re building for Moodle Workplace’s multi-tenant architecture, on a managed host without direct server access, for a compliance-critical platform serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This session is a practitioner’s field report from roughly 6 months of iterative plugin development: six plugins built or in-progress, all running in production, none built with the luxury of a dev environment that mirrors production. The focus is on the constraints that forced interesting solutions — tenant-scoped capability patterns, the $USER-by-reference session bug, opcache deployment traps, PHP namespace gotchas — and the spec-first discipline that kept rework manageable. Attendees with Moodle development experience will leave with concrete patterns they can apply; those newer to plugin development will leave with an honest picture of what production Moodle development actually involves.
- Teacher: Darrel Tenter