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

Chapter 5. Customizing the Look and Feel

There are two primary ways to change the Moodle look and feel—themes and course formats.

Moodle themes provide a way for you to change the appearance of any Moodle page. Although this is primarily done through the appropriate use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) definitions, we will focus on methods of importance to programmers.

Course formats provide a way of changing how a course page is displayed. This allows you to completely change the way in which a course provides its main page information.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Program a theme to display standard navigation links in both the header and footer

  • Create a new course format to display a forum's discussions directly on the course page

Themes

Moodle themes provide a way of affecting the appearance of any page within Moodle. Through a mixture of CSS and PHP code, themes allow us to lay out our pages in creative ways.

How themes work

All themes require four files as a minimum: config.php, styles.php, header...