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

Converting activity Foo! to pagelib


Why should we convert activity Foo! to use pagelib? It's already a fully-functional activity module. We have already done all of the coding necessary to display a proper Moodle page for our activity. There are actually several benefits of taking the effort to make this change, such as:

  • Easier and more consistent page management

  • Breadcrumb navigation is automatically generated

  • It adds block support

  • Easier future upgrades and code maintenance

  • It is easier to create additional pages for the module

  • Better alignment with Moodle programming guidelines

Creating a local pagelib.php

Let's start by creating our local pagelib.php file. We will base our file on examples from the core activity modules. In particular, we will use the quiz module's pagelib.php and view.php files as a template. We need to make only minor updates in order to get our page working correctly.

In this section of code, note the inclusion of the core pagelib file. Also, note the inclusion of /course...