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

Introduction to pagelib


pagelib describes itself as the library that contains the parent class for Moodle pages, page_base, as well as the page_course subclass. A page is defined by its page type (that is, course, blog, or activity) and its page ID (courseid, blogid, activity ID, and so on).

pagelib defines three classes: page_base, page_course, and page_generic_activity. Let's have a quick look at each of these types.

Class page_base

All other page types are ultimately derived from this base class. Most Moodle extensions will extend from one of the other two page types that are derived from this base class.

Class page_course

page_course is the page type that is used to build course pages. We can extend this base type when creating new course formats.

Class page_generic_activity

page_generic_activity is for use with activity modules. This is the base class used by most of the core activity modules to create their page displays.

In the next section, we will take a brief look at the areas of...