General developer forum

quick update - I have added this temporarily by directly modifying profile.php (I know, I know, it's totally the wrong way to do it, this is more of a proof of concept). I inserted this code starting at line 356 of profile.php (between the 'suspended' hidden field and the echo "</table></div></div>")

$courseCheckCon = mysql_connect("localhost","username","secret");
mysql_select_db("moodle", $courseCheckCon);
$completedCoursesQuery =        "SELECT mdl_course.fullname " .
                                                        "FROM mdl_course " .
                                                        "INNER JOIN mdl_course_completions " .
                                                        "ON mdl_course.id=mdl_course_completions.course " .
                                                        "WHERE mdl_course_completions.userid=" . $_GET["id"];
$completedCourses = mysql_query($completedCoursesQuery,$courseCheckCon);
echo "<tr><td class=\"label c0\">Courses Completed: </td><td class=\"info c1\"><ul>";
while ($eachCompletedCourse = mysql_fetch_array($completedCourses))
        {
        echo "<li>" . $eachCompletedCourse["fullname"] . "</li>";
        }
echo "</ul></td></tr>";
mysql_close($courseCheckCon);

This works fine, it displays the completed courses exactly as I want it to. My next step is figuring out how to use this in the form of a plugin for future proofing. I have looked through http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugins and I think the  closest match for what I need would be the user profile fields plugin type. The issue is that this seems to be defined for the type of custom fields where the user can enter them, as opposed to dynamic, automatically populated fields. I had a look at the local plugin type but it seems more suited to adding blocks or responding to events on a backend scale. I may be totally misreading the documentation but I get the idea that the plugin system is designed more for adding or overlaying objects to the existing moodle layout without changing the already existing content (such as profile.php).

Is there a way for me to replicate the changes I have made here using plugins, or should I just consign myself to copying my script back into place whenever we update?