Book Image

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By : Ian Wild, Jaswant Tak
Book Image

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By: Ian Wild, Jaswant Tak

Overview of this book

The new and revamped Moodle is the top choice for developers to create cutting edge e-learning apps that cater to different user’s segments and are visually appealing as well. This book explains how the Moodle 3.x platform provides a framework that allows developers to create a customized e-learning solution. It begins with an exploration of the different types of plugin.. We then continue with an investigation of creating new courses. You will create a custom plugin that pulls in resources from a third-party repository. Then you’ll learn how users can be assigned to courses and granted the necessary permissions. Furthermore, you will develop a custom user home. At the end of the book, we’ll discuss the Web Services API to fully automate Moodle 3.x in real time.

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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Dedication
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture
Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture
Understanding Moodle
More on Moodle plugins
Running a local Moodle
Installing and configuring Moodle
Introducing the project
Agile software development
Version control
Moodle Internals - Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
Our first plugin - a custom string manager
Summary
2
Moodle Plugins - What Can I Plug In?
Moodle Plugins - What Can I Plug In?
Managing users
Managing courses
Course content
Reporting and analytics
Look and feel
Other major plugin types
What cannot be done with plugins?
Summary
3
Internal Interfaces
Internal Interfaces
Adding configuration settings
System APIs
Summary
4
Course Management
Course Management
Course formats
Course blocks
Text filters
Summary
5
Creative Teaching - Developing Custom Resources and Activities
Creative Teaching - Developing Custom Resources and Activities
Teaching interactions
Developing a Resource plugin
Preparing for release
Activities
Summary
6
Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds
Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds
Authentication
Summary
7
Creating a Dashboard - Developing a Learner Homepage
Creating a Dashboard - Developing a Learner Homepage
The client's requirement
Encouraging learners to start a course
Summary
8
Creating a New Skin
Creating a New Skin
Theme plugin structure
Renderers
Templates
Theme responsiveness
Summary
9
Moodle Analytics
Moodle Analytics
Reporting
Web Services
Summary
10
Appendix
Appendix
Testing
PHPUnit
Behat
Moodle guidelines
General guidelines
The code checking tool
C# client
Installing Visual Studio
Creating a new project
Creating a test harness
Connecting to an XML-RPC API
Decrypting data
Decompressing data
Final testing
Source control with GitHub
Installing Git
Committing changes

Chapter 3. Internal Interfaces

In the previous chapter, we investigated the types of plugin that we can develop to enhance the Moodle platform. But how does a plugin talk to Moodle? In Chapter 1, Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture, we introduced a few of the Moodle Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), specifically discussing why as developers we should use the data manipulation API to talk to the Moodle database rather than manipulating the database directly.

We begin this chapter by taking up the local plugin we developed in Chapter 1, Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture ;and begin to enhance it to do some more interesting things--for example, it would be more useful if we can configure the languages it displays and it might be useful if we can specify the order in which the languages are displayed.

By the end of this chapter, you will have:

  • A good appreciation of the different types of APIs available
  • Worked with the main presentation APIs--form, and output renderers...
Previous Section
End of Section 1
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