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Moodle 1.9 Extension Development
melbenson writes "Moodle 1.9 Extension Development by Jonathon Moore and Michael Churchward, published by Packt Publishing, definitely delivers what it says on the book cover — 'Customize and extend Moodle by using its robust plugin systems.' This book, intended for users with a solid knowledge of the Moodle software and Moodle technologies, does a great job of opening the doors to creative and useful ideas to take your Moodle site to the next level. The book takes the reader through many examples of customizing and editing the Moodle code in an easy to understand, user-friendly way but also presents the reader with challenging and advanced concepts." Read on for the rest of melbenson's review.
Moodle 1.9 Extension Development
author
Jonathan Moore, Michael Churchward
pages
320
publisher
Packt Publishing
rating
9/10
reviewer
melbenson
ISBN
1847194249
summary
Shows 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.
I've been working with the free open-source software, Moodle, for the past 3 years as an admin in a school district and consulting, which includes experience with Moodle themes, the Moodle database, admin tasks, user technology support and the end-user interface and functionality. I also have knowledge in CSS, web development and a basic understanding of PHP and server topics. I work with Moodle, read several Moodle-related books, attend Moodle user groups and participate in the online Moodle community but amuch of the information covered and talked about is the basic tech support and technology integration (which is great!) but I've been craving to learn more of the 'geeky"' code topics in Moodle. When I saw the title of the book I was expecting material on coding, development and more technical topics compared to the other Moodle books and that is exactly what I got.
In the beginning of the book the author goes over basic, but powerful tasks like creating and modifying blocks and activities. Later on, the book discusses more advanced topics like integrating Moodle with other systems, pagelib and formslib and web services.
The 'Customize and extend Moodle by using its robust plugin systems' phrase from the book cover describes this book very well. It discussed and showed just how much you can customize your Moodle site to fit your needs and create integrations between other systems. this book covers everything from simply creating a block to integrating the Moodle system with other systems and implementing Single Sign On (SSO). The full table of contents can be seen on the Packt Publishing website. The book involved heavy discussion about PHP, which was expected since Moodle is written in PHP and the book was basically all about editing the code. I'm a newbie with PHP so some of the examples were over my head but I know I will be able to go back and reference things I didn't fully understand the first time.
After reading this book I think this book is for any programmers, database and web development people and tech savvy Moodle admins, which is what I was expecting and the reason why I was so excited to read it. I don't think this book is intended for newbies to Moodle or Moodle technologies (PHP, MySQL, CSS/HTML) however, like myself, you don't have to be an expert in all of those subjects. I would say this book is for intermediate to advanced Moodle users and programmers.
I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company. The author also does a good job of informing the reader of the date of publication and alerts the reader of possible changes in future versions. Although the topics in the book were technical, the author does a good job of using language that was easy to read and follow along with. The only hardware that readers will need to follow along is a computer using any type of operating system. To follow along with the examples readers will also need an installation of Moodle, which is an open-source free software. Readers can install the free software locally on their computer or install it on a hosting service.
Throughout the entire book there were real-life examples and screenshot images. The only issue with the screenshots was that they were not in color which I think could have enhanced the experience of following along. To go along with the examples there was sample code presented in the book and the full source code is available for download. The example code for download will be great for future reference and it will be useful when I go through the examples again and try to do the tasks myself and experiment on my own.
The book covered and accomplished pretty much what I had expected. I can't think of anything that I thought the book was missing, besides going into more detail about the specific topics I was personally interested in. One reason I was so excited to begin reading this book is because I've read about a half dozen Moodle books and this one, I felt, was going to contain by far the most 'technical' and 'back-end' related material compared to all of the others. I have no knowledge of any other Moodle books that are similar in subject to this one, although I have a feeling that more books like this one will be coming.
Overall, I very much enjoyed reading this book and it is personally, my favorite Moodle-related book. Not because I thought it was better written, better quality or contained the most information but because it covered exactly what I was hoping it would. I personally think the best parts about this book were the coding and advanced technical topics covered, the real life examples covered and the provided full source code for download for future experimentation and reference.
You can purchase Moodle 1.9 Extension Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
In the beginning of the book the author goes over basic, but powerful tasks like creating and modifying blocks and activities. Later on, the book discusses more advanced topics like integrating Moodle with other systems, pagelib and formslib and web services.
The 'Customize and extend Moodle by using its robust plugin systems' phrase from the book cover describes this book very well. It discussed and showed just how much you can customize your Moodle site to fit your needs and create integrations between other systems. this book covers everything from simply creating a block to integrating the Moodle system with other systems and implementing Single Sign On (SSO). The full table of contents can be seen on the Packt Publishing website. The book involved heavy discussion about PHP, which was expected since Moodle is written in PHP and the book was basically all about editing the code. I'm a newbie with PHP so some of the examples were over my head but I know I will be able to go back and reference things I didn't fully understand the first time.
After reading this book I think this book is for any programmers, database and web development people and tech savvy Moodle admins, which is what I was expecting and the reason why I was so excited to read it. I don't think this book is intended for newbies to Moodle or Moodle technologies (PHP, MySQL, CSS/HTML) however, like myself, you don't have to be an expert in all of those subjects. I would say this book is for intermediate to advanced Moodle users and programmers.
I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company. The author also does a good job of informing the reader of the date of publication and alerts the reader of possible changes in future versions. Although the topics in the book were technical, the author does a good job of using language that was easy to read and follow along with. The only hardware that readers will need to follow along is a computer using any type of operating system. To follow along with the examples readers will also need an installation of Moodle, which is an open-source free software. Readers can install the free software locally on their computer or install it on a hosting service.
Throughout the entire book there were real-life examples and screenshot images. The only issue with the screenshots was that they were not in color which I think could have enhanced the experience of following along. To go along with the examples there was sample code presented in the book and the full source code is available for download. The example code for download will be great for future reference and it will be useful when I go through the examples again and try to do the tasks myself and experiment on my own.
The book covered and accomplished pretty much what I had expected. I can't think of anything that I thought the book was missing, besides going into more detail about the specific topics I was personally interested in. One reason I was so excited to begin reading this book is because I've read about a half dozen Moodle books and this one, I felt, was going to contain by far the most 'technical' and 'back-end' related material compared to all of the others. I have no knowledge of any other Moodle books that are similar in subject to this one, although I have a feeling that more books like this one will be coming.
Overall, I very much enjoyed reading this book and it is personally, my favorite Moodle-related book. Not because I thought it was better written, better quality or contained the most information but because it covered exactly what I was hoping it would. I personally think the best parts about this book were the coding and advanced technical topics covered, the real life examples covered and the provided full source code for download for future experimentation and reference.
You can purchase Moodle 1.9 Extension Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The first couple of sentences should explain what the hell "Moodle" is. All I know after reading your introduction is that it's a thing of some kind with plugins....
Plug posing as a story !!!
Slashdot: Ads For PHPers, Software That's Dead
Yours In AT.S.A. Airport Security Screening Line
Kilgore T.
slashdot = stagnated
Moodle (abbreviation for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is a free and open-source e-learning software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Moodle is a VLE, a virtual learning environment. It's for academic institutions like schools and universities. The institution creates a module for each course that might be taught and in that course is a hierarchy for each year of students and resources used by them. It depends how it is configured but each module has like a portal which has a calendar, where links to uploaded files can be put (Word, powerpoint, excel etc) and you can even run assessments of it.
With all that said, as a user, it is a horrible piece of software. It's a VLE that just doesn't improve my learning. It might put it all in one place but I regard it more of a CMS than an education system.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
This is the book of the month for sure, baby !!
Oprah is calling right now !! Get the presses running !!
These book reviews are consistently the most useless things posted here. I hope Slashdot is getting a decent chunk of change for it at least.
Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.
It's also a good example of a successful FOSS project, with an active and growing user community, used by more than 38 million students in 212 countries, translated into 81 languages, and with thriving commercial support community.
Moodle really needs a re-design of the help system to plug the xss vulnerabilities through 'help.php'. My advice is to analyze the code and correct the core code design flaws prior to writing an extension, because you may have to go back and rewrite your extension to accommodate changes to the script API. Moodle also kills its host database performance with the way it runs queries, which will also require a major overhaul. In short, coding for Moodle is not a good idea for newbies.
Last I checked, moodle did things like checking to see if the universally abhorred magic quotes were enabled, and if not, it emulated them, to make absolutely sure that all developers had to deal with that crap; is that still the case? :-/
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Am I misinterpreting 'moodle'?
On the one hand I appreciate someone bring greater exposure to Moodle, particularly as I've occasionally considered writing a plugin for it myself. On the other hand, I'd love to see this book reviewed by someone who actually has some programming chops. Statements like "I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company" aren't really helpful - the whole point of reading a review of a technical book is to find out things like whether the book is accurate or not.
My guess is that writing a Moodle plugin is the reviewer's first "scratching my own itch" project, I wish the reviewer well with it, and would love to hear from more experienced programmers about this book (if anyone's read it).
So Moodle 2.0 was finally released about a week ago. Suffice to say, there are massive differences between Moodle 1.x and 2.x - as such I'm not sure of how helpful this book would be to anyone who's already upgraded (or will be any time soon). I'm far from a Moodle expert, but as a newb admin of a Moodle deployment I feel a bit sorry for this book's authors. Hopefully the impact of 2.x isn't so great in the case of extension dev. I don't know.
(*all the pandas suddenly cried out*)
The Moodle codebase should have been taken out back and shot years ago.
In the context of this site and of the Web in general, "CMS" is not "Course Management System" but "Content Management System". Typical examples of CMSs that are mentioned on Slashdot regularly are Drupal, Joomla!, and Django, and book reviews for such CMSs appear here regularly.
If you're going to come here from a narrower or more specific application domain (Edu) and expect to be understood, you need to define your terms first. You can't just expect people to automatically know what you're talking about if you use abbreviations that mean something quite different in common public use.
These book reviews are consistently the most useless things posted here.
In this case the book is probably even more useless than you realize. Moodle just came out with version 2.0 last week and, speaking as a Moodle plugin developer (for a question type which understands algebra), there are enough changes that this book pretty useless.
Moodle 2.0 just came out and there are enough changes that learning to code for the 1.9 interface would be a waste of time. If you are starting out I'd go straight to 2.0 - I'm now having to make the leap in order to update my algebra question plugin.
Thanks for adding the summary. There was another Moodle book review on Slashdot last week, which also made the same incorrect assumption about its audience, and I was one of several people who ranted about that. I'm curious about how you got asked to write the book review - was it the Moodle organization, or Slashdot's editors, or a publisher?
It's fairly common to have articles on Slashdot saying that Frobnitz 3.2.4 has just been released, with descriptions of a couple of bugs that got fixed and minor features that got added, which might mean something to existing users, but with a couple of million readers, not everybody knows if something's a widely popular game (we're not all gamers) or a software development product or something hopelessly obscure and niche-y, or if it's something new and cool we might want to read about. A sentence or two of summary up front really helps readers know whether they want to read the whole article or not.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why is this modded troll? Seems pretty insightful to me.
I don't know about Coward, more like Anonymous Laziness - to lazy to create and keep track of an account.
The obvious next question is: [When] will this book be updated for Moodle 2.0?
Although much is the same or similar, there are some significant changes from 1.9 to 2.0, especially in
data structures which influence how one would set things up and how files are shared.
I am a developer at a school that runs the mentioned Blackboard course management software which "competes" with Moodle - or at least it is used for much of the same purposes. Blackboard is written in Java and runs on Tomcat. As someone who has developed for Moodle in a previous life, Blackboard is much easier and more preferable to develop on. At least I don't have to completely rewrite my Blackboard "plugins" as a Moodle developer would have to when going from 1.9 to the "newly" released 2.0 version. I say "newly" because it has been on the verge of being released for over a year. Even though the project is open source, decisions about the project are all centalised in one man's head in Australia. The decisions made broke this compatibility for virtually all plugins and themes in 2.0 unfortunately rendering this book rubbish. And in a recent video, he said he hopes to rewrite it again from scratch in 3.0!
I'd like to have a copy of this book, anyone can recommend this one? We are using Moodle at school, and i want to learn how to develop extension for it. Is this book a really good one? I have programming skills in php and been working with wordpress for some time now. Thanks! -Chin Hospedagem de site