The Moodle Marketplace replaced the plugins directory: what changed

For almost twenty years, Moodle plugins came from one place: the plugins directory at moodle.org/plugins, free, community reviewed, GPL. Since July 2026 that address redirects to the Moodle Marketplace at marketplace.moodle.com, and the rules changed. Plugins can now be sold. Moodle HQ takes a cut. And about a hundred plugins did not make the move.

If you run a Moodle site, the part that can bite you is the last one. If you write plugins, the money part is new.

What happened, and when?

Moodle HQ announced the Marketplace in February 2026 and opened it to paid plugin developers first.¹1 Diego Monroy, Moodle launches its own plugin store, citing Moodle’s announcement of 26 February 2026. It went live in July. Sources disagree on the exact day, from the week of 13 July to 21 July, but by 21 July it had replaced the directory as the official source of plugins.²2 Mindfield Consulting, Moodle Marketplace and the plugins that were not migrated, data checked 20 and 21 August 2026. Today, links to moodle.org/plugins/anything send you to the matching Marketplace page.

Free plugins were migrated automatically with their files and metadata. The old directory is a read-only archive.

What does it cost a developer to sell a plugin?

According to the terms reported at the announcement, Moodle takes 20% of each sale during the first year after launch and 25% after that.¹ Payments go through Stripe Connect, in US dollars, and the developer is the merchant of record. That means you, not Moodle, handle terms of sale, invoices and sales tax.

Paid plugins are reviewed by Moodle HQ staff before they appear, even if they passed community review before, and again every year.³3 Pimenko, Moodle Marketplace: feedback on your plugins. Pimenko, a French Moodle company that listed five paid plugins at launch, wrote up the process:³

• Four stages: automated tests, submission, active review, completed review. Feedback comes through a Jira ticket.
• A missing privacy provider blocks publication, even for plugins that store no personal data.
• Every file needs a correct copyright notice.
• The Marketplace does not manage licences. You build access control yourself on top of Stripe.
• A plugin with a free tier still has to be listed as paid.
• Stripe is not available in every country, and if it isn’t in yours you can’t sell.

That last point deserves more attention than it gets. Moodle is big in countries where Stripe does not operate, across much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Developers there can still publish free plugins, but the new way to earn from plugin work is closed to them for now.

Which plugins were left behind?

Mindfield Consulting counted 105 plugins that were not migrated, because their maintainers asked to stay out. Some were abandoned. Others are widely used: themes like Adaptable and Foundation, the Collapsed Topics course format, activity modules, a OneDrive file converter.²

The date that matters already passed. From 31 August 2026, plugins that were not migrated stopped being offered through the update API. Installed copies keep working, but your site no longer hears about new versions of them.²

When Mindfield checked on 20 August, 76 of those plugins still pointed at the old directory. Of the 76, 29 had a Moodle 5.x release, 16 stopped at 4.x and 31 stopped at 3.x or older. Half of them had a release uploaded in 2025 or 2026, so these are not all dead projects.²

Why can’t I find a plugin I know exists?

Probably because of the default search filter. Marketplace search hides plugins whose last release is more than three years old. On 21 August that meant 1,574 plugins in the default view and 2,828 with the filter off.² About 1,250 plugins are there, just hidden.

Hiding old plugins is reasonable. A plugin with no release in three years almost certainly hasn’t been tested on Moodle 5.x. But “not updated” and “broken” are not the same thing, and some small plugins simply never needed changes.

What should a site admin do now?

1. List your add-on plugins. Site administration, Plugins, Plugins overview, filter by additional plugins.
2. Look each one up on the Marketplace. Missing ones are either among the 105 or were renamed. Check the maintainer’s GitHub for where they publish now.
3. For plugins outside the Marketplace, update from the maintainer’s repository yourself, or plan a replacement. Your site will not remind you.
4. Check your deploy scripts. Marketplace downloads need Bearer token authentication, so a pipeline that downloads plugin zips from moodle.org needs credentials or a new source.²
5. Budget for paid plugins. A plugin you rely on may move to paid, with a yearly price.

Is this good for Moodle?

Mostly, yes, with two caveats.

The old directory had a real problem: free plugins that thousands of sites depend on, maintained by one person in their spare time until they stop. A way to get paid is the most direct fix for that, and a yearly review by Moodle HQ is more than most paid plugins anywhere get.

The caveats are the ones above. Stripe-only payouts shut out developers in a large part of the world Moodle serves. And a fee of 20 to 25% is in app store territory, for a marketplace that doesn’t handle licensing.

For custom work, nothing changes. A plugin built for your site is yours under the GPL, installed from your own repository, and never needs a Marketplace listing. If you want one listed, the review checklist above is the same one we build every plugin to: privacy provider, tests and clean code from day one.