Brendan Heywood, Moodle Developer at Catalyst IT, developed an awesome plugin “Link crawler robot“ focused for helping the Moodle site administrators in identifying and fixing the broken links, slow and large links from a student perspective.
The plugin is a admin tool type plugin and is a very handy plugin which crawls through your moodle site following links and reporting on links that are either broken or that link to very large files.
The plugin is having dependency on another plugin by Brendan named “Basic Authentication” which is required as the plugin architecture is such that it will only find broken links that actually matter to students and to do that from outside it needs to authenticate in Moodle.
According to the plugin description:
It is recommended that you setup a dedicated ‘robot’ user who has read only access to all the site pages you wish to crawl. You should give the robot similar capabilites that real students will have.
To know how to set it up for your Moodle site, you may follow the documentation here. The plugin is available for Moodle 2.7 onwards and can be downloaded from the Moodle plugins database here.
The plugin is also awarded with the Reviewers’ choice award which is given by the plugins guardians and reviewers for particularly useful, well coded or otherwise interesting plugins.
Have you ever faced issues with broken links on your Moodle site? How you had fixed that? Do share with us in the comments below.
