Scheduled Messages is in the Marketplace, and it is our first paid listing

A maintenance notice needs to be up on Friday evening and gone by Monday morning. In practice someone switches it on by hand, and two weeks later it is still there. Scheduled Messages lets you set the announcement up once, with a start and end date, and handles the rest itself.

More than a banner

An announcement does not have to be site-wide. With the right capability, teachers manage the announcements for their own course, without you handing out administrator rights. Beyond that, you decide per message who sees it, where it sits and what it looks like:

• Audience: authenticated users, guests, or precisely those visitors who are not logged in. That last one is what you need during an outage where logging in is the thing that fails.
• Placement: as a site banner, at the top of the page or in the notifications area.
• Styling: the Bootstrap styles from Moodle or a colour of your own, aligned left, centred or right.
• Dismissal: for the current session or for good, and you can reset those stored choices when the same announcement needs to come round again.

Why this one costs money

Our plugins have been free for years, and they stay that way. This one is not, and we would rather say so plainly. Since this year the Moodle Marketplace makes it possible to maintain a plugin on a subscription, and that is exactly what a plugin like this needs: testing and adjusting it at every Moodle release, and answering questions from the people running it in production.

So what you buy is not the right to use the plugin. The code is GPL, like the rest of ours. The subscription pays for updates and support. Stop it and the plugin keeps working, and you may keep using the last version you received for as long as you like; what stops are the new versions and the support.

What you need

• Moodle 4.5 up to and including 5.2.
• A subscription per production site. Test, staging and development copies of that same site are included.
• A credit card, or not. You can buy it in the Marketplace, but if that does not work for your procurement, request it from us on invoice instead.