Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

To Susannah

Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

Customize your Moodle apps by creating custom plugins, extensions, and modules

Ian Wild

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

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Moodle 3.x Developer's Guide

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

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Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

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First published: June 2017

Production reference: 1270617

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78646-711-9

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Credits

About the Author

Ian Wild is an experienced software developer, solutions architect, author, and educator with over 20 years' experience in the field of software design and implementation.

Fifteen years working in private industry saw Ian specializing in the design and development of access and learning aids for blind, visually impaired, dyslexic, and dyscalculic computer users, while also working part-time as a tutor and lecturer. Teaching only part-time meant not spending as much time with his students as he would have wished and this, coupled with his background in the development of communication technologies, and seeded his long-time interest in e-learning.

Ian is also, author of Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner's Guide and Moodle Math. He was also technical reviewer of Science Teaching with Moodle, Moodle Multimedia and Practical XMPP.

Many more names should go on the cover of this book than just mine. Firstly, many thanks must go again to the team at Packt Publishing for your guidance and support as this book was being produced. Next, thank you to the reviewers - including colleagues, friends and family - who kept me, my ideas and my writing focused and meaningful. As ever, a very big thank you must go to you the reader for taking the time to read this book. My aim is to show not tell. The purpose of this book isn't just to show you how to do things: it is to attempt to give you a grounding in Moodle development, perhaps reveal some interesting ideas, point the way to you, and, hopefully, give you some inspiration. Remember, if you do encounter any issues or you have any more questions do come and join the community. We are there to help you with your Moodle-related issues.

My final thank you must always go to Martin Dougiamas and his team. Thank you, all of you.

About the Reviewer

Susan Smith Nash is involved in the design, development, and administration of e-learning and m-learning programs for learners pursuing degrees, certification, credentialing, and professional development. Her current research interests include the effective design of competency-based education, knowledge management, knowledge transfer, and leadership. Her articles and columns have appeared in magazines and refereed journals. She received her PhD from the University of Oklahoma, and in addition to e-learning, Nash has also been involved in international economic development training, interdisciplinary studies, interdisciplinary petroleum geosciences programs, and sustainable business and career training. Her book, Leadership and the E-Learning Organization, was co-authored with George Henderson, and published by Charles Thomas and Sons. Her most recent books include E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers, and E-Learner Survival Guide, Texture Press. Her edublog, E-Learning Queen has received numerous awards and recognition's.

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Table of Contents

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture

Understanding Moodle

More on Moodle plugins

Running a local Moodle

Moodle architecture - the LAMP/WAMP stack

Installing WampServer

WampServer and Skype

Setting up an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Configuring the Eclipse IDE

Configuring remote debugging

Installing and configuring Moodle

Introducing the project

Planning is everything

Agile software development

Version control

Moodle Internals - Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

An object-oriented philosophy

Types of APIs

Our first plugin - a custom string manager

The user story

The development process

Step 1: Understanding the problem

Step 2: Researching potential solutions

Moodle plugin directory

Moodle community forums

Moodle Tracker

String API

Step 3: Implementing the solution

Standard plugin features

Summary

Moodle Plugins - What Can I Plug In?

Managing users

Authentication

Enrolment

Learner competencies

Managing courses

Course layout

Course content

Resources

Activities

Quiz plugins

Assignment plugins

Where to find course interaction plugins

Other important course plugin types

Blocks

Editor plugins

Text filters

Reporting and analytics

Look and feel

Other major plugin types

What cannot be done with plugins?

Summary

Internal Interfaces

Adding configuration settings

Wireframing

Moodle application layers

Storing configuration data

Creating an admin settings page

Updating the get_string() function

Plugin language strings

System APIs

Events API

Plugin data and services

Form API

File Storage API

Cache API

Output renderers

Summary

Course Management

Course formats

GPS location - background to the project

Obtaining device location

Device location - security issues

Configuring SSL on WampServer

Understanding renderers

Finding a user's location with the Geolocation API

Including JavaScript

Specifying location settings

Displaying sections based on location

Try it yourself

Course blocks

Configuring the QR Code block

Including the QR Code library

Manipulating files with the File API

Serving files from the file store

Try it yourself

Text filters

Subscribing to a text changed event

Try it yourself

Summary

Creative Teaching - Developing Custom Resources and Activities

Teaching interactions

Developing a Resource plugin

Rendering a three-dimensional model

Module configuration

More on file handling

Plugin library callbacks

Rendering the Model

More on JavaScript

Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) API

Reporting events

Other files

Installation scripts

XMLDB editor

Allowing user comments

More on file handling

Styling

Backup and Restore API

Backup API

Restore API

Roles and permissions

Preparing for release

Minimising JavaScript

Taking things further

Activities

Enhanced choice

Editing choices

Summary

Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds

Authentication

Authentication - general principles

Getting logged in

Single sign on

WordPress to Moodle - SSO options

Calling WordPress code directly

Cookie authentication

Links from WordPress to Moodle

External Web Services APIs

OAuth overview

Installing the WordPress OAuth 1.0a server

Creating a new Moodle auth plugin

Configuration

Handling OAuth calls

Handling the Moodle login event

Taking things further

Course Enrolment

A WordPress course enrolment plugin

Taking things further

Management of Competencies

Creating a new admin tool plugin

Synchronisation settings

Connecting to external databases

Taking things further - Moodle CLI scripts

Summary

Creating a Dashboard - Developing a Learner Homepage

The client's requirement

Addicted to learning

Course progress block

Including graphics libraries

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)

Converting progress data to JSON

Constructing a progress chart

Creating a chart

Making the chart clickable

Taking things further

Dashboard progress overview

Taking things further

Encouraging learners to start a course

Implementing a new course availability block

Determining progress

Creating the Description page

Taking things further

Summary

Creating a New Skin

Theme plugin structure

Page layout

Theme library functions

Taking things further - updating the theme screen grab

Renderers

Creating a plugin renderer

Overriding a component renderer

Custom styling

Including images in CSS

Taking things further - styling button icons

Page layouts

Taking things further - doing more with page layouts

Templates

Mustache

Overriding templates in a theme

Theme responsiveness

Summary

Moodle Analytics

Reporting

Report plugin structure

Grabbing data

Reporting learner success

Determining certificates issued

EXPLAIN a query

Saving data

Creating spreadsheets

Taking things further

Displaying activity data - a bubble chart example

Accessing the report

Building the block

Extracting the data

Including D3.js libraries

Rendering a bubble chart

Further improvements

Web Services

Developing a new external API

A hello world API

Building a new API

Encrypting data

Decrypting data in PHP

Decrypting data in C#

Summary

Appendix

Testing

PHPUnit

Behat

Describing a scenario

Step definitions

Moodle guidelines

General guidelines

Describing functions and methods

Whitespaces and indentation

Configuring Eclipse indentation

SQL query coding style

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

Configuring SSH

Committing changes

Atomised commits

Preface

For any organization that's considering implementing an online learning environment, Moodle is often the number one choice. Key to its success is the free, open source ethos that underpins it. Not only is the Moodle source code fully available to developers, but Moodle itself has been developed to allow the inclusion of third-party plugins. Everything from how users access the platform and the kinds of teaching interactions that are available through to how attendance and success can be reported--in fact, all the key Moodle functionalities--can be adapted and enhanced through plugins.

Using real-world examples, this book will show you how to enhance a default Moodle installation with novel plugins to authenticate and enroll users on to courses, new and interesting teaching interactions, new custom skins, and enhanced course layouts.

Obviously, a book of this length won't be able to cover every single plugin type, but by the end of Chapter 9, Moodle Analytics, you will have a thorough grounding in Moodle plugin structure, a detailed understanding of how plugins should interact with Moodle's internal Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and plenty of great ideas to help you enhance your Moodle installation with new, custom plugins. If you have developed a plugin you feel would be useful to the Moodle community, you should certainly consider submitting it to the Moodle Plugins Directory at https://moodle.org/plugins/.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture, introduces the ethos of the Moodle project and how it has influenced the internal architecture. We prepare ourselves for plugin development by installing the tools we need.

Chapter 2, Moodle plugins - What Can I Plug In?, investigates the main plugin types, such as those dealing with users and how they access the platform. Also, it covers plugins that provide the learning interactions that users experience when they take a course. We also looks at the less obvious plugins, such as filters.

Chapter 3, Internal Interfaces, shows the different types of application programming interfaces (APIs) Moodle provides to support plugin development.

Chapter 4, Course Management, demonstrates how courses can be enhanced through the development of novel course formats. We see how plugins can be used to modify course structure and, by so doing, enhance teaching.

Chapter 5, Creative TeachingDeveloping Custom Resources and Activities, shows that there are two types of teaching interaction: resources and activities. Both of these are types of course module plugin. In this chapter, you will learn how Moodle course plugins work, which scripts need to be present in order for your plugin to behave correctly, and how to modify course plugins to fit your needs.

Chapter 6, Managing Users - Letting in the Crowds, explores how plugins can manage users in a variety of different contexts. We develop two novel plugins, one to authenticate users against an external WordPress site using OAuth, and another to automatically enroll users onto courses when they connect to Moodle via WordPress.

Chapter 7, Creating a Dashboard - Developing a Learner Homepage, teaches us how plugins can be used to create an enhanced learner homepage. Gamification is all about using the same tricks and techniques employed by game developers to entice learners into progressing with courses. In this chapter, we learn how plugins can be developed to promote similar techniques.

Chapter 8, Creating a New Skin, focuses on aesthetics after we have concerned ourselves with functionality. We investigate how Moodle can be rebranded through theme plugins, with a particular focus on support for mobile and tablet devices.

Chapter 9, Moodle Analytics, showcases how to develop plugins to monitor and analyze learner behavior. We learn how to extract data efficiently, how to judge the effectiveness of that extraction, and the various means by which data can be reported, including via a secure external interface.

What you need for this book

You will need a computer suitable for software development, one that can run a web server and a separate development environment (Chapter 1, Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture, guides the reader through the necessary configuration steps). This book is aimed at developers, so it is assumed that you will be able to install Moodle with minimum fuss. If you need more information on Moodle administration, check out Moodle Administration, also available from Packt (visit https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/moodle-3-administration-third-edition for details).

Who this book is for

This book is for Moodle developers who are familiar with the basic Moodle functionalities and have an understanding of the types of scenarios in which the Moodle platform can be usefully employed. You must have medium-level PHP programming knowledge and should be familiar with the HTML and XML protocols. You do not need to have prior knowledge of Moodle-specific terminology.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: For example, an administration setting named local_duallang/primarylanguage is accessed by calling get_config('local_duallang', 'primarylanguage').

A block of code is set as follows:

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: When the learner clicks on the Description button, the client wants a Course information page to be displayed.

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book--what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail feedback@packtpub.com, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support