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

Chapter 12. Constructing and Displaying Pages by Using the pagelib Library

The pagelib library is used for constructing and displaying pages in Moodle. This chapter will cover the basic concepts of using pagelib. pagelib is an important core library, but has little, if any, official documentation. Although the source code includes comments, most of the functions are not documented in PHP Doc format and so are not visible from the Moodle Xref site. They can only be viewed by direct inspection of the /lib/pagelib.php file. This chapter covers the following major topics:

  • Page classes

  • Core modules that use pagelib

  • pagelib core functions

  • Requirements for using pagelib

  • Updating activity Foo! to use pagelib

  • Related libraries

Note that the ultimate goal of this chapter is to show you how to use pagelib in your development projects. Because there is little reference material available in the Moodle community on pagelib, we have included it in this chapter. If you want to see the practical application,...