Author Archives: ronaldpringadi

Profiling a Dockerized Moodle with Xdebug and QCachegrind on macOS

Posted on June 22, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

If you run Moodle under moodle-docker on a Mac and a page feels slow, eyeballing the code only gets you so far. The honest answer is a profiler. 🐳 Here’s how I wired up Xdebug for both step-debugging and on-demand … Continue reading →

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Setting Up a Moodle REST API Webservice in Five Steps

Posted on June 18, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

Moodle ships with a full web-services layer, but the admin flow for handing out a single API token is spread across half a dozen settings pages. The first time you do it, you’ll click around for twenty minutes wondering why … Continue reading →

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Enabling Vite Hot Reload for Moodle SCSS

Posted on June 16, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

🐳 I spent an afternoon chasing a deceptively simple goal: edit a stylesheet in a custom Moodle theme, hit refresh, and see the change — without running a full production build every time. The tool that promises exactly this is … Continue reading →

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A Quick Tour of Mustache Templating in PHP (and Everywhere Else)

Posted on June 9, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

If you’ve worked in a large PHP codebase like Moodle, you’ve bumped into files ending in .mustache and wondered what those double curly braces are doing. 🐘 The short version: Mustache is a logic-less templating language, and the syntax you … Continue reading →

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Adding a Moodle cron sidecar to moodle-docker via local.yml

Posted on May 28, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

The moodle-docker stack is designed primarily for automated testing — Behat, PHPUnit, and so on — which is why it doesn’t ship a cron container. A background scheduler would interfere with deterministic test runs, so the README’s only nod to … Continue reading →

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Creating a new theme and changing font on Moodle 5

Posted on May 27, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

I wanted to swap the default font in a Moodle 5 install. Specifically: keep Boost, the stock Moodle theme, but use Inter from Google Fonts instead of the Bootstrap system stack. The official path is “make a child theme of … Continue reading →

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Local HTTPS for dev sites with Caddy, mkcert, and a reverse-proxy gotcha

Posted on May 27, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

Running a local web app over plain HTTP is fine until something forces your hand — a third-party SDK that refuses to load on http://, a cookie that needs the Secure flag, or an app like Moodle that nags you … Continue reading →

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Running multiple Moodle instances side-by-side with moodle-docker

Posted on May 27, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

The moodle-docker project gives you a one-command Moodle dev stack — Apache, PHP, the database of your choice, mail catcher, the lot. What its README mentions only in passing is that you can run several Moodle instances on the same … Continue reading →

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Multi tenancy in Laravel using stancl/tenancy

Posted on May 26, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

I spent a day inside stancl/tenancy (the database-per-tenant Laravel package) shipping a real change to a multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application, and a few things finally clicked for me — none of which were obvious from the documentation alone. 💡 Here … Continue reading →

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Moodle Plugin Development: version.php, install.xml, upgrade.php, and tasks.php Explained

Posted on May 14, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

Moodle is one of the largest Learning Management System (LMS) platforms in the world, and one of its quietly excellent superpowers is its plugin architecture. Every feature you can add — a new activity, a block, a report, an authentication … Continue reading →

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