Development hints and tips

There is a great deal of development experience amongst the Moodle developers. This page is some general hints and tips that may help people starting out in PHP and Moodle development.

This is work in progress. If you have some perls of wisdom, please add it...

Follow the Coding Guidelines

Moodle has a well developed set of Coding Guidelines. Read them and follow them. It's surprising how many custom plugins for Moodle do not. It instantly prevents your code from being incorporated in core Moodle.

Use a Version Control system

If you are developing without a version control system then you are doing it wrong. The benefits run well beyond just being able to keep past versions of your code. Moodle currently uses CVS for core development but this is probably a poor (out of date) choice for a new project. The world seems to be moving towards Git. This is a powerful distributed system and does take a bit of getting your head around but the effort is worth it.

Find an editor or IDE that works for you and learn it properly

There are many different development platforms from complex Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to simple editors and command line tools. Choose something that works for you and then take the trouble to learn how to use it properly.

Comment effectively

Don't be shy about putting comments in code. If the code deserves a blank line it probably deserves a comment. It's obvious what the code does now but it won't be in six months.

Use good variable and function names

It should be easy and obvious to pick a name for a variable or a function. If it isn't you are either trying to make that function too complicated (simplify and break it up) or you haven't full understood what you are trying to do (another cup of coffee?). Names should always say what they are for or what they do - plainly.