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 8. Creating Moodle Reports

Moodle's goal is learning. One of the key requirements of organizations that are delivering learning is to be able to measure that learning. One of Moodle's great strengths is its logging of user activity in courses. Just about every click within a course is logged, along with the time, date, username, user's IP address, module accessed, and the action performed by the user. Moodle also includes a large library of built-in reports. These reports compile and analyze the log tables and other data in the Moodle database into usable information for administrators, teachers, and students. Examples of these reports include grade reports, activity reports, sitewide statistics, and system health checks, amongst others. Administrators often find that they need a custom report to get the data in exactly the format that their organization desires. Because of Moodle's excellent logging system, we normally have all of the data that we need to provide new reports that...