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

Programming best practices


When developing your database code, there are some best practices that you should adhere to. We will briefly discuss some of these.

Take only what you need

When extracting a large record from a data table, consider what information you actually need. Then, only get the field or fields that you need for processing. If it is one field you need, from one record, always use a get_field call. If you need more than one field, specify the ones you need in your get_record() call. Make sure that you include the id field as the first field if you are retrieving more than one record, so that there is a unique index for the returned array.

By retrieving only the data that you need, you can improve the speed of the database function and reduce the amount of memory needed for the program.

Limiting your returned data

When your code expects multiple records from a database call, it is always best to limit the number of records that you will get back. Use the $limitfrom and $limitnum...