Course contents block is a plugin for Moodle that displays a list of all visible sections (such as topics or weeks) in the course. Clicking at a link scrolls to that section or displays just that particular section, depending on the course layout setting.
If the section name is explicitly defined, it is displayed in the course contents outline. If enabled, the block can eventually extract a suitable section title from the section summary text.
Section titles can be enumerated.
In older Moodle versions, course sections could not be named explicitly. Many teachers used to put headings manually to the course summary text fields. This block did an awesome job that it automagically extracted these headings from the summary fields and generated a nice course contents from them.
This feature is still available but it is less useful in modern Moodle versions where course sections can have explicit section titles defined.
If the section name is not explicitly defined and the auto title feature is enabled, the block automatically extracts a suitable title for the section from the section summary text.
If the summary starts with a heading (H1, H2, H3, etc), the heading will use such heading text. If the summary starts with a bold text, it will be used as a section title. If the summary consists of several paragraphs, the first one will be used.
Technically speaking, the plain text content of the first non-empty HTML DOM node from the section summary can be used as the summary title.
The block has been written and is currently maintained by David Mudrák.
See the block page at Moodle wiki for more details.