- Invitation enrollment plugin for Moodle
- Table of Contents
- Basic Overview
- Requirements
- Download Invitation for Moodle
- Installation
- Usage
- Updating
- Uninstallation
- Limitations
- Language Support
- Troubleshooting
- FAQ
- Contributing
- Motivation for this plugin
- Further Information
- License
The Invitation enrollment plug-in for Moodle allows instructors to invite students to their course and site, and grant necessary access and role to them. The invitation is sent via email and contains a link with an unique, one-time use invitation token.
When the user clicks on the link and logs into the site, (s)he is automatically enrolled into the course and the invitation link is marked as used.
The benefits of using this plug-in over an enrollment key are:
- You can control who can use the invitation.
- You can see a history of past invitations and their status.
- You can also see who used an invitation or which ones are expired.
- You can resend expired invitations or send reminder invitations.
This plugin requires Moodle 2.6+ from https://moodle.org/ .
The most recent release of Invitation for Moodle is available from: https://moodle.org/plugins/enrol_invitation
The most recent DEVELOPMENT release can be found at: https://github.com/michael-milette/moodle-enrol_invitation
This is a fork of the original plugin by Jérôme Mouneyrac. Michael Milette (TNG Consulting Inc.) is the maintainer of this plugin since September 2021.
This version of the Invitation plugin also includes contributions by:
- University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
- Yuriy Petrovskiy (PetrovskYYY)
- Lukas Celinak (lukascelinak)
- Michael Milette, TNG Consulting Inc. (michael-milette)
See the git log for a full list of contributors.
The initial public BETA version was released on 2011-10-29. The maturity is STABLE as of 2022-04-26.
Like any other plugin, install the plugin to the following folder:
/enrol/invitation
In order for the enrolment method to be available in a course and for the Invitation button to appear on the Participants page in your course, the plugin must be:
- Installed - See https://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_plugins for details on installing Moodle plugins.
- Enabled - Go to Site Administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage Enrol Plugins and clicking on the "eye" icon for Invitation so that it is open (no line across it).
- Added Invitation to the list of enrolment methods available in your course - See In-course Setup for details. Note that you will need to repeat this last step in each course where you want Invitation to be available.
This release been tested. Although we expect everything to work, if you find a problem, please help by reporting it in the Bug Tracker.
The Invitation enrolment method must be added to the course.
- Go to your course.
- Navigate to Navigation Drawer > Participants > Gear icon > Enrolment Methods. If you are using a Moodle theme that uses the navigation block instead of drawer - as seen in the Classic theme, go to Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods instead.
- In the Add method field, select Invitation.
- Configure the settings and use the Save Changes button.
For more information, see adding an enrolment method to your course.
You can customize the email being sent in a few ways:
You can modify the message sent by email by navigating to Site Administration > Language Customization. Follow the prompts. The language string to be modified is in the enrol_invitation component, specifically the emailmsghtml_help string.
Note that you can use any of the following plain text tags within the body of the email message including the custom message:
- {$a->coursename} : The course fullname.
- {$a->start} : The course start date.
- {$a->end} : The course end date. If no end date is specified, it will be replaced by No end date.
- {$a->inviteurl} : URL of the accept link
- {$a->acceptinvitation} : The words "Accept invitation".
- {$a->rejecturl} : URL of the reject link.
- {$a->rejectinvitation} : The words "Reject invitation".
- {$a->expiration} : The date and time at which these links will expire.
- {$a->message} : Your custom message, as entered at the time you send the invitation.
- {$a->location} : Picked-up from one of the following places: A field called location in your course format - only available in some 3rd party course formats, a custom course field called location'**. If neither of these exist, its value will simply be 'online'. Important: These variables cannot be used when setting the default message for an instance of Invitation or when sending the invitation.
- {$a->supportemail} : Support email address for the site. If not defined, will use the address of the primary administrator.
- {$a->emailmsgunsubscribe} : Unsubscribe/Support message.
- {$a->email} : Invitees email address - always available.
- {$a->username} : Invitees username - only available if the user already has an account on the site, otherwise blank.
- {$a->firstname} : Invitees first name - only available if the user already has an account on the site, otherwise blank.
- {$a->lastname} : Invitees last name - only available if the user already has an account on the site, otherwise blank.
- {$a->surname} : This is an alias for {$a->lastname}.
If you are using a filter plugin such as FilterCodes, you can also use its plain text tags. However, keep in mind that profile related tags such as {firstname}, {lastname}, {username}, {email}, etc. refer to the profile of the user sending the invitation, not the person who is being invited. To work around this, use the above mentionned tags instead.
Reminder: If you have a multi-language site, you will need to customize the message for each language.
This is a message that can be customized and will be integrated into the default message template.
You can set the default email subject course name by navigating to Site Administration > Plugins > Enrolment > Invitation. You will find 3 options for the subject line: Course fullname, course shortname and custom.
If you select the Custom option, you can customize the customsubjectformat language string of the enrol_invitation plugin using the Moodle Site Administration > Language > Language Customization tool in Moodle. There you can use any combination of the short and long course names. When this plugin is first installed, the custom format is set to {$a->shortname} - {$a->fullname}.
Once the Invitation enrollment method has been added, invitations can be sent by doing the following:
- Go to the course.
- Use the Participants button in the navigation drawer. If you are using a theme that still uses the navigation block, go to Course administration > Users > Enrolled users.
- Use the Invite users button. It should be located next to the Enrol users button.
- Complete the invitation fields and then use the Invite users button to send the invitation.
- Note that the invitation will expire, by default, in 2 weeks. You can check the status of the invite by clicking on the Invite history tab.
- Depending on the status of the invitation, you may have the following actions available:
- "Revoke invite": Will set the expiration of an active invitation to the current time. This will disable the use of the invitation link sent to the user.
- "Extend invite": Will resent the invitation and extend the expiration of an active invitation.
- "Resend invite": For an expired invitation, will pre-fill the invitation form with the same settings used when the original invite was sent.
Note that you cannot send an invitations to email addresses of people who have previously rejected the invitation within the specific course. There will be no indication of this but no email will be sent and it will not appear in the history. The Reject link works as an Unsubscribe link to conform with anti-spam requirements. In this situation, you can still enrol students in a course using one of the other available enrolment methods but the user will need to first have an account on the site.
Several translations have been contributed however there are many part of this plugin that have been recently re-written in the 2021-2022 BETA release. Translations in the language pack for languages other than English will need to be reviewed. There are no other special considerations required for updating the plugin.
For more information on releases since then, see CHANGELOG.md.
Uninstalling the plugin by going into the following:
Home > Administration > Site Administration > Plugins > Manage plugins > Invitation
...and click Uninstall. You may also need to manually delete the following folder:
/enrol/invitation
Note that, once uninstalled, any tags and content normally handled by this plugin will become visible to all users.
There are no known limitations at this time.
This plugin includes support for the English language. Several translations have been contributed however there are many part of this plugin that were re-written in 2021-2022. Translations in the language pack for languages other than English will need to be reviewed.
If you need a different language that is not yet supported, please feel free to contribute using the Moodle AMOS Translation Toolkit for Moodle at
This plugin has not been tested for right-to-left (RTL) language support. If you want to use this plugin with a RTL language and it doesn't work as-is, feel free to prepare a pull request and submit it to the project page at:
https://github.com/michael-milette/moodle-enrol_invitation
There are no troubleshooting tips at this time.
QUESTION: When I send an invitation, I get a confirmation message indicating that the invitation was sent. Why is the message not is received by Invitee?
ANSWER: This will happen if you previously sent an invitation to a course to a user and they rejected the invitation. This is by design so that the user does not continue to receive invitations (anti-spam). You can review previous rejections in the Invitation History log.
You can still manually enrol the user into the course. You should be able to send them invitations to other courses unless they reject the invitation to those courses as well.
If you see an Active invitation in the Invitation History log and the user has not received it, confirm their current email address and have them check their spam folders/filters.
If you are interested in helping, please take a look at our contributing guidelines for details on our code of conduct and the process for submitting pull requests to us.
Michael Milette - Author and Lead Developer
Big thank you to the following contributors. (Please let me know if I forgot to include you in the list):
- MSVermet - Case insensitive comparison between invitation email and user email. (2023)
- Jerome Mouneyrac for his work on the original invitation enrollment plug-in in which this one is based upon.
- The staff, faculty, and students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that were involved in creating the additional use cases, development, and refinement to this tool.
Thank you also to all the people who have requested features, tested and reported bugs.
The development of this plugin was motivated through our own experience in Moodle development, features requested by out clients and topics discussed in the Moodle forums. The project is sponsored and supported by TNG Consulting Inc.
For further information regarding the enrol_invitation plugin, support or to report a bug, please visit the project page at:
https://github.com/michael-milette/moodle-enrol_invitation
Copyright © 2021-2024 TNG Consulting Inc. - https://www.tngconsulting.ca/
This file is part of Invitation for Moodle - https://moodle.org/
Invitation is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Invitation is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Invitation. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.