README

A Moodle local plugin that highlights recently added and recently modified activities and resources directly on the course page, so students can quickly spot what's new without hunting through every section.

• "New" badges appear next to activities that were added to the course within a configurable time-span.
• "Updated" badges appear next to activities whose content was modified (and that aren't already flagged as new) within that same time-span.
• An optional recent content list can be shown at the top of the course page, summarising the newest and most recently updated items.

Everything is configurable site-wide via the admin settings page, and every course can optionally override those defaults for its own needs.

Requirements

• Moodle 5.0+ ($plugin->requires = 2024100700;)
• PHP as required by your Moodle version

Installation

1. Copy (or clone) this plugin into local/newupdate_indicator in your Moodle codebase.
2. Visit Site administration → Notifications to complete the installation, or run php admin/cli/upgrade.php from the command line.
3. Configure the site defaults at Site administration → Plugins → Local plugins → New and updated activity indicator.

How it works

The plugin compares two timestamps for each activity in a course:

• course_modules.added — when the activity was added to the course.
• The activity instance's timemodified value (where the module table provides one) — when its content was last changed.

If an activity's added timestamp falls within the configured time-span, it is shown as new. Otherwise, if its modified timestamp is more recent than its added timestamp and also falls within the time-span, it is shown as updated. Once both timestamps fall outside the time-span, no indicator is shown.

Indicators are only shown for activities the current user can see ($cm->uservisible).

Site administration settings

All settings live in a single section at Site administration → Plugins → Local plugins → New and updated activity indicator:

Indicator position

Badges can be placed:

• Before the link / After the link — inline with the activity name, in the normal text flow.
• Top-left / top-right / bottom-left / bottom-right corner — absolutely positioned within the padded area of the activity card, clear of the icon and activity name.

Colour styles

Badge colours are named after Bootstrap's contextual colours (Primary, Secondary, Success, Danger, Warning, Info, Light, Dark), so they adapt to your theme's palette automatically (with sensible fallback colours for themes that don't define the Bootstrap design tokens).

Per-course overrides

Teachers and managers (anyone with the local/newupdateindicator:manage capability — granted to the Teacher and Manager roles by default) can override any of the site defaults for an individual course from Course administration → New/updated indicator settings. This includes:

• The time-span.
• Whether the "new" and "updated" indicators are shown — these can be toggled independently, e.g. show "new" badges but hide "updated" badges for a particular course.
• The label, icon and colour for each indicator type.
• The badge position.
• Whether the recent content list is shown, and how many items it lists.

When the "Override site default settings for this course" option is unchecked, the course follows the site defaults and any values entered are ignored.

Capabilities

Privacy

This plugin does not store any personal data — only per-course display preferences (labels, icons, colours, positions, time-spans). It implements Moodle's null_provider privacy interface.

Architecture notes

• classes/local/config.php resolves the effective configuration for a course by merging site defaults (from get_config()) with any per-course override stored in the local_newupdate_indicator table (null columns mean "inherit the site default").
• classes/local/indicator_finder.php works out which course modules should currently display an indicator, and whether each should be "new" or "updated".
• classes/local/page_injector.php builds the badge and recent-list markup (server-side, using html_writer and Mustache templates) and assembles the data structure passed to the front end.
• amd/src/indicator.js (built to amd/build/indicator.min.js) places the pre-rendered markup into the DOM on the course page — there is no core hook that lets a local plugin add content directly to each activity item, so the module locates each activity by its data-id and inserts the badge at the configured position.
• lib.php hooks into local_newupdate_indicator_before_footer() (the before_footer callback) to load the AMD module on course view pages only.

License

GNU GPL v3 or later. See https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.