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

Common tables and relationships


Moodle has many tables, and plugins can add many more. There are a few tables that factor in to almost every task that you do. We will look at these, and their relationships to the other tables, in order to understand the data relationships in Moodle.

Course and module relationships

Let's take a look at course modules, and the tables that impact each one.

The following screenshot is a data relationship diagram showing the key relationships defined for the course_modules table. As you can see, this one table has links to five other Moodle tables. Every one of those links refers directly to an id field in another table.

The instance field links to the specific module table that the course_modules record is an instance of. In this case, it is a forum module, but it could be any valid Moodle module. In the following screenshot, the id field of the forum table is referenced by the instance field. The table to be referenced (for example, forum) is determined from...