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

Upgrading our activity database


The upgrade.php file provides code to upgrade our module as we release new versions of Moodle. It is only necessary if we have deployed our module to users and subsequently make updates that require the database to be changed.

Using the XMLDB editor for database upgrades

The recommended method of updating an activity's database is to use the XMLDB editor. It provides a GUI that you can use to update the database, including adding new tables. The editor will output both a complete new install.xml file and the PHP code needed for our upgrade.php file.

Updating upgrade.php

This function is called by Moodle core when a new version of the module is detected. The version in Moodle's configuration database is compared to the value found in the module's version.php file. Following is a sample section of code generated from the XMLDB editor. It illustrates the code needed to add a scale field to the foo table.

Our if condition indicates that the upgrade should be run...