Moodle 3.2 introduced the concept of end dates for courses. Moodle 3.3 added a new Course Overview block which uses end dates to determinate whether a course is in progress, in the past, or in the future. This is pretty great, unless you’re in the following situation:

  • Your school has five years worth of courses
  • Those courses don’t have end dates

Congratulations—you now have five years of courses in progress. Your faculty will have five pages worth of past courses on the Course Overview block! That’s probably undesirable. To avoid it, I’m writing a plugin that lets an administrator set course start and end dates at the category level. While working on it, I ran an interesting edge case with Behat acceptance tests, reminding me that you’d best treat Behat like it’s a real user.

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