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

Coding lib.php


The lib.php file stores all of the basic functions used by the other files in the module. Most of the functions required by Moodle are included by the NEWMODULE template. Many of the functions defined in the template will work for activity Foo! without any changes. In this section, we will cover just the modifications necessary to make our activity function. This is also a good location in which to put our own additional functions. We might add functions, either for re-usability or for code clarity. An example of this is the foo_grade function, which will be covered at the end of this section. Note that you can optimize your code performance by placing these additional functions into the locallib.php file instead of lib.php. This improves performance because core Moodle functions will include the module's lib.php file, but they won't need the locally added functions. The Moodle core programming guidelines state that it is only necessary to create a separate file if you make...