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 14. Development for the Adventuresome: Web Services

Moodle currently has two popular implementations for web services: Remote-Learner Web Services library, and Moodle Networking. Remote-Learner Web Services are SOAP-based and Moodle Networking is XML-RPC-based. The SOAP library allows remote manipulation and the creation of courses, users, user enrollments, grade passing, and SSO. It is also a great example of what you might accomplish by leveraging the techniques covered in this book. The XML-RPC library provides a secure channel, SSO, and full Moodle API exposure (with serious caveats) to the trusted site.

During the writing of this book, we had to make what some may consider a controversial decision to focus more pages on the RL Web Services library than on Moodle Networking. Moodle Networking is the official core Moodle method for web services. So this would be the argument in favor of its importance. Or even that it is more important than the RL WS library. However, in practice...