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

Generating install.xml


install.xml defines the database structure for the module. It is recommended that we start with the basic install.xml file from the NEWMODULE template. From there, we can use either an XML editor or a text editor to customize the database to our specific needs.

Using the XMLDB editor

The recommended method to edit the database structure is to use the XMLDB editor from the Site Administration | Miscellaneous menu. This editor allows us to quickly and easily make changes. Although we could easily hand-edit the file, the XMLDB editor makes it an easier and less error-prone process. The editor is especially useful for making upgrades to our database schema as we release new versions of the module. It provides both a new XML file and the PHP code to run in our update.php file. We will cover the update.php file in an upcoming section. Following is a screenshot of the XMLDB editor in action.

Defining our activity database

Every activity module is required to have...