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

Creating course reports


Moodle has a simple method of including new course reports. All that is required is a subfolder in the ./course/reports folder and a file called mod.php. This file (mod.php) contains a fragment of HTML/PHP code that gets included in the course report list. Stay tuned! We will cover the specifics of how to do this in an upcoming section of this chapter. Typically the mod.php file will generate a link to another PHP file, normally index.php. We might also want to use some of our other tricks from past chapters. All of the common elements that we have studied in the past, such as language files, version.php, and access.php all apply to report modules. We will create a sample report, the non-participants report, which will use all of these elements. In the next section, we start to dig into this new report.

For the official developers' documentation for course reports, see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Course_Report_Plugins.

Defining the non-participants report...