Developer documentation

This Developer section of Moodle Docs is aimed at developers who contribute to the Moodle code, plugins, themes, and so on.

• If you manage a Moodle site, Administrator documentation may suit your needs better.
• If you teach using Moodle, try Teacher documentation.

Note: New developer documentation pages should be added to the Development namespace by typing Development: before the new page name i.e. [[New page name]]. If you are a developer, you probably want to change your preferences to include the Development namespace in searches.

A page may be added to the Developer category by adding the template {{CategoryDeveloper}} to the bottom of the page. - If required, you can use [[Category:Sort key]] to provide a sort key other than the default page name.

Speaking in English E-Learning Course

Speaking in English E-Learning Course

Speaking in English E-Learning Course

Speaking in English E-Learning Course

Speaking in English E-Learning Course

Speaking in English E-Learning Course

How you can contribute

Make a new plugin

The M in Moodle stands for modular, and the easiest, most maintainable way to add new functionality to Moodle is by using one of the many plugin APIs. There are many types of plugin you can write:

• Activity modules, see also NEWMODULE Documentation (work in progress)
  • and Sub-Plugins (2.0 Onwards)
• Admin reports
• Assignment types
• Authentication plugins
• Blocks
• Content editors (2.0 onwards)
• Course formats
• Course reports
• Course importers (2.0 onwards)
• Database fields
• Database presets
• Enrolment plugins
• Filters
• Gradebook report
• Gradebook export
• Gradebook import
• Message senders (2.0 onwards)
• Mnet services
• Plagiarism detection plugins (2.0 onwards)
• Portfolio plugins (2.0 onwards)
• Question types
• Question import/export formats
• Quiz reports
• Repository plugins (2.0 onwards)
• Resource types
• Search engine adapters
• Themes which are different in Moodle 2.0, and earlier versions.
• User profile fields
• Web services (2.0 onwards)
• Workshop allocators (2.0 onwards)
• Workshop forms (2.0 onwards)
• Workshop evaluators (2.0 onwards)

General information that applies to all types of plugins

• Where to put language strings for your plugin
• Defining the database tables for your plugin

Please see the Guidelines for contributed code for an overview of how to contribute to the Moodle code.

Sometimes it is not possible to write a proper plugin for what you want to do, in which case you may have to resort to using the local customisations hook.

Change core code

Some types of change can only be made by editing the core Moodle code. Such changes are much harder to maintain than plugins. If you want your core change to be considered for inclusion in the official Moodle release, you need to create an issue in the tracker, and attach your change as a patch. It is also a good idea to discuss your ideas in the forums first. See Overview#Major_Development for more details.

Ways to contribute that do not involve PHP programming

• Create Moodle themes
• Translate Moodle into other languages
• Help document Moodle
• Join the testing effort, which involves participating in the bug tracker

Plans for the future

Ideas for and details of planned future features of Moodle are initially discussed on the forums in the Using Moodle course at moodle.org. That developer discussions are intermixed with user discussions in the same forums may seem strange at first but is one of the reasons for the success of Moodle. It is important that both end-users and developers discuss the future features together.

Once ideas begin to crystallize on the forums they can be summarized in this wiki, either as part of the roadmap or in the form of developer notes. These pages then form the basis for further discussion in the forums.

• Roadmap
• Developer notes
• Student projects
• Developer meetings

Resources

• Developer FAQ - frequently asked questions, especially useful for newcomers to Moodle
• Finding your way into the Moodle code - also aimed at newcomers
• Moodle tracker - bug reports, feature requests and other tracked issues
  • Firefox tracker search - How to setup a firefox quicksearch to easily navigate to moodle bugs
  • Firefox Search Plugins - Find tracked issues even more easily
• Unmerged files - changes on the stable branch in CVS that have not been merged to HEAD
• Browse the code online:
  • the code with a complete change history from CVS
  • the code, with links generated by PHPXref
• Moodle PHP doc reference - compiled nightly from the comment attached to each class and function in the code.
• Database Schema - for recent releases
• Development news and discussion section of Using Moodle course
  • especially the General developer forum
  • cool tricks you can use in the moodle.org forums

Tools

Some tools people use when working on Moodle code:

IDEs

• Setting up NetBeans for Moodle development - NetBeans for PHP is a great out-of-the-box editor.
• Setting up Eclipse for Moodle development - Eclipse is a great editor to use for php development, if you can work out how to set it up.
• Setting up Vim for Moodle development
• Aptana Studio 2

Browser add-ons

• Firebug, see Firebug for details.
• Web developer extension
• ViewSourceWith - The main goal is to view page source with external applications, but you can do a lot of other things as well.

Miscellaneous

• Ctags - Using a tags file to navigate code
• W3C HTML validator - Moodle has built in support to make using it easier.
• Windows Installer - Windows Installer documentation for developer.

See also: Useful Development Tools forumin the Introduction to Moodle Programming course

See also

• Moodle Security Announcements
• Moodle Partners - providers of custom Moodle development services