Moodle 3 Developer’s Guide

Key Features

• Customize your Moodle 3 app.
• Leverage the new features of Moodle 3 by diving deep into the Moodle development eco-system.
• Cater to heavy user traffic, customize learning requirements and create custom third party plugins.

Book Description

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 is visually appealing as well.

This book explains how the Moodle 3 platform provides a framework that allows developers to create a fully customized and tailored e-learning solution. It begins with an exploration of the different types of plugin that are available for Moodle, and you will learn which plugin is the best solution for which particular problem.

We then continue with an investigation of how new courses can be created and managed by custom plugins. You will create a custom plugin that pulls in resources from a third-party repository and see how custom resource and activity modules can be developed to provide custom e-learning interactions. Then, once courses have been made available on the platform, you’ll learn how users can be assigned to courses and granted the necessary permissions-all through the development of new authentication and enrollment plugins.

Furthermore, you will develop a custom user home page using the ‘My Moodle’ feature together with the creation of custom blocks. At the end of the book, we’ll discuss the Web Services API to provide custom external APIs that you can use to fully automate Moodle 3 in real time.

What you will learn

• Work with the different types of custom modules that can be written for Moodle 3
• Understand how to author custom modules so they conform to the agreed Moodle 3 development guidelines
• Get familiar with the Moodle 3 architecture-its internal and external APIs
• Customize Moodle 3 so it can integrate seamlessly with third-party applications of any kind
• Build a new course format to specify the layout of a course
• Implement third-party graphics libraries in your plugins
• Create a lightweight responsive Moodle theme
• Provide custom APIs that will provide the means to automate Moodle 3 in real time

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Getting to Grips with the Moodle 3 Architecture
Chapter 2. Moodle Plugins – What Can I Plug In?
Chapter 3. Internal Interfaces
Chapter 4. Course Management
Chapter 5. Creative Teaching – Developing Custom Resources and Activities
Chapter 6. Managing Users – Letting in the Crowds
Chapter 7. Creating a Dashboard – Developing a Learner Homepage
Chapter 8. Creating a New Skin
Chapter 9. Moodle Analytics
Chapter 10. Appendix