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Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By : Wild, Jaswant Tak

4.5 (2)

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

4.5 (2)

By: 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.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

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

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

Internal Interfaces

Internal Interfaces

Adding configuration settings

System APIs

Summary

Course Management

Course Management

Course formats

Course blocks

Text filters

Summary

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

Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds

Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds

Authentication

Summary

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

Creating a New Skin

Creating a New Skin

Theme plugin structure

Renderers

Templates

Theme responsiveness

Summary

Moodle Analytics

Moodle Analytics

Reporting

Web Services

Summary

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

Renderers

In previous chapters, we have encountered renderers (for example the three-dimensional model viewer we developed in Chapter 5,Creative Teaching - Developing Custom Resources and Activities) without delving into too much detail regarding why they exist and how they can be used. In fact, renderers aren't obligatory at all: in the previous chapter, we created dashboard blocks that didn't include renderers. Let us use the Courses available block as an example. This block outputs its HTML straight from the get_content() function. That's fine as far as it goes, but if we were wanting to alter the form and layout of the Courses available block in any meaningful way, we would need to alter the block itself. This is especially true if we were going to be installing the block in different Moodle installations, where each installation had its own distinctive look-and-feel. It's certainly true that we could change the look of the block using CSS but, again, that will only take us so far. Implementing...

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