Author Archives: ronaldpringadi

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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Block Countries by IP on Debian Trixie with nftables and xtables-addons

Posted on May 11, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

Debian Trixie uses nftables as its default firewall. If you’re used to iptables, the commands still work — but they go through an iptables-nft compatibility shim that translates them to nftables rules under the hood. For country-based IP blocking, the … Continue reading →

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How to Set Up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — Step-by-Step Guide

Posted on May 11, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

If you’ve been putting off setting up Google Analytics because you’re still on the old “Universal Analytics” (UA) — it’s time to act. UA is officially dead: Standard UA properties stopped collecting data on July 1, 2023 UA 360 (premium) … Continue reading →

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Using PHP with Mustache: Practical Examples and Gotchas

Posted on May 11, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

If you want clean templates in PHP without pulling in a full framework, Mustache is a great fit. It keeps logic out of views, which forces you to prepare data in PHP first and makes templates easier to scan later. … Continue reading →

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