Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

By : Wild, Jaswant Tak

4.5 (2)

Buy this Book

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

4.5 (2)

By: Wild, Jaswant Tak

Buy this Book

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

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

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?

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

Adding configuration settings

System APIs

Summary

Course Management

Course formats

Course blocks

Text filters

Summary

Creative Teaching - Developing Custom Resources and Activities

Teaching interactions

Developing a Resource plugin

Preparing for release

Activities

Summary

Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds

Authentication

Summary

Creating a Dashboard - Developing a Learner Homepage

The client's requirement

Encouraging learners to start a course

Summary

Creating a New Skin

Theme plugin structure

Renderers

Templates

Theme responsiveness

Summary

Moodle Analytics

Reporting

Web Services

Summary

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

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Internal Interfaces

In the previous chapter, we investigated the types of plugin that we can develop to enhance the Moodle platform. But how does a plugin talk to Moodle? In Chapter 1, Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture, we introduced a few of the Moodle Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), specifically discussing why as developers we should use the data manipulation API to talk to the Moodle database rather than manipulating the database directly.

We begin this chapter by taking up the local plugin we developed in Chapter 1, Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture ;and begin to enhance it to do some more interesting things--for example, it would be more useful if we can configure the languages it displays and it might be useful if we can specify the order in which the languages are displayed.

By the end of this chapter, you will have: