Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Extension Development

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Extension Development

Overview of this book

Moodle gives you the power to create and customize feature-rich plug-ins. If you can write Moodle plug-ins, you can make it do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to new features, to completely changing the way it looks; plug-ins are the method Moodle offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of Moodle plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Blocks, Activities, Grading components, Reports, Fliters that change the way your site works and looks. You will develop standard Moodle plug-ins such as Activities, Filters, and Blocks by creating functioning code that you can execute in your own Moodle installation. Writing modular plug-ins for Moodle will be a large focus of this book.This book will take you inside Moodle and provide you with the ability to develop code the “Moodle way”.This book will expose you to all of the core code functions in Moodle, in a progressive, understandable way. You will learn what libraries are available, what the API calls are, how it is structured and how it can be expanded beyond the plug-in system.You will begin by getting an understanding of the basic architecture that Moodle uses to operate in. Next you will build your first plug-in; a block. You will carry on building other Moodle plug-ins, gaining knowledge of the “Moodle way” of coding, before plunging deeper into the API and inner libraries. Lastly, you will learn how to integrate Moodle with other systems using a variety of methods.When you have completed, you will have a solid understanding of Moodle programming and knowledge of how to extend its functionality in whatever way you want.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Extension Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Other important libraries


Moodle relies on a number of libraries, both internal and external. Several of these are explained below:

PEAR

PEAR stands for PHP Extension and Application Repository. As such, it's not a single library but a set of tools for getting and updating PHP libraries and modules.

ADOdb

ADOdb is a database library that provides a unified programming interface for a large variety of databases. Although Moodle supports a limited core set of databases for its direct backend, ADOdb really shines through in the supported databases for both the external database authentication and the enrollment plugins.

YUI

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library is written in JavaScript, and is used to create rich web interfaces using AJAX, DOM, and DHTML. The Moodle course editing interface relies on this library for drag-and-drop placement of course elements.

XMLDB

XMLDB was added to Moodle as part of the initiative to add Microsoft SQL and Oracle backend support for Moodle. XMLDB rationalized all of the database configuration files to XML schemas, so that the same files could be used across all four supported backends. This extended upon the capabilities available from ADOdb, providing a single code base for accessing all databases supported, while still providing appropriate performance.