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

Adding a language file


Like other plugins in Moodle, blocks can have their own language files to manage their display strings. They are contained within a special lang directory within the block's file structure. Moodle uses a hierarchical structure for its language folders. This is designed to allow for parent and child language folders and packs. Language packs are a collection of all of the core language strings needed to support a language. Moodle has an integrated language pack installer, which is used to add language packages for core Moodle. A good example of a parent language folder is en_utf8. The name en_utf8 indicates this is the language folder for English with Unicode encoding. A child language for English is the US dialect. This is designated with the folder name en_us_utf8. Moodle allows the child language to inherit strings defined in the parent language. This lets us rapidly develop language support for dialects by minimizing the work to defining only the strings that...