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

User access issues


User access is the first line of protection that Moodle has. Content and functionality can be protected so that anyone has to first log in using a valid account before they can access the content or functions of the site. Beyond that, specific functions within the site can be controlled by allowing or preventing capabilities for roles (see the section on access controls inChapter 1,Moodle Architecture

Any main script in Moodle must verify a user's identity and their ability to access the script's function.

Note

A main script is one that is called from the browser and executed directly, as opposed to a library function that is called somewhere from within another script

We will examine the common scripts that you need to use in order to make your user code secure.

Making sure that a user has logged in

Moodle sets a number of session variables that track the duration of a user's session. These can all be left for Moodle to manage as long as the user has been logged in and identified...