General developer forum

Hi Fabio,

The only Moodle 2.0 development book I know of is called "Moodle JavaScript Cookbook". Unfortunately I don't know of any other books. Maybe the fact that Moodle 2.7 will be a LTS (long term supported) will encourage authors to come out with a book.

For now, I've put together a list of online resources for you that helped me get started in Moodle development. I've even put together a few of my own to share.

Introduction to Moodle 1.8 Programming - Important note: Moodle 2.x has some important different from 1.8. That being said, I found it very helpful to go through this course. It is unfortunate that it was never updated for Moodle 2.x.

Here are a few others:

• Moodle Development
• Moodle Coding Guide
• Moodle Coding Styles
• Moodle Developer Documentation
• Moodle Documentation -- For Users and For Developers
• Moodle Debugging

Here are a few more links to online tools you will find useful:

• Moodle General Developer Forum - A place to ask questions, get feedback and help other community members
• Moodle Sandbox -- runs the latest stable version of Moodle
• Moodle QA Testing Site - A place you can go and test your code
• Moodle Tracker - Report issues, request new features and share solutions to Moodle core and 3rd party contributions (like plugins and themes)
• GitHub -- The official place to post your patches for integration into Moodle and code repository for plugin development
• Git for Developers -- instructions on using Git for Moodle Developers
• How to Report Bugs Effectively and How to Manipulate Moodle Developers
• Moodle General Developer Meetings (YouTube recordings - )
• Moodle videos on YouTube
• Moodle on Twitter - If moodle.org goes down, get updates from here.

Some useful development tools you will also want to install include:

• Moosh - Moodle Shell. Be sure to watch the videos. If you want to create a plugin for example, this will dramatically increase your productivity.
• User Related Debugmodus - Though not as good as Moodle's built-in Debug Developer Mode, this is a great tool you can use to enable debugging on a per user basis on a production server.
• Moodle Debugger in Developer Mode (click Home > Site Administration > Development > Debugging - be sure to check the box next to "Display debug messages" if you want to see the errors on your screen. Otherwise they just end up in your log file.
• phpMyAdmin or Adminer - to view and edit Moodle's MySQL database tables.

Here are a couple of draft articles I put together as I was learning:

• Getting Started in Moodle
• Git for Moodle Developers in Windows

Upgrading XAMPP Control Panel in Moodle

XAMPP 1.7.4 came with XAMPP Control Panel v2.5 which is virtually featureless. In fact, v2.5 isn't even listed in the changelog anymore!

After installing Moodle for Windows, complete the following steps to discover the wonders of CPL 3.2.1:

• Download XAMPP Control Panel v3.2.1
• Extract the files and copy the following into the root of your moodle/xampp folder:
  - Files: xampp-control3.exe, catalina_stop.bat, catalina_service.bat and catalina_start.bat
  - Folders: locale

Visit ApacheFriends to locate the latest version of the control panel and a list of changes.

Moodle development can feel overwhelming at first but, if you persist, read the documentation and ask questions, it does get easier.

Hope you find something in all of this useful. Keep what is useful and/or meaningful to you and forget the rest. If I think of anything else, I'll be sure to post it for you.

Best regards,

Michael Milette