General developer forum

Hi Dave

Again I'm not sure it will solve whatever you want to do but the basic process would be:

1. Call a renderer from your get_content() function in block_name.php, eg

$renderer = $this->page->get_renderer('block_name');
$this->content->text = $renderer->fetch_block_content();

2. Create a renderer.php file with the function fetch_block_content()

class block_name_renderer extends plugin_renderer_base {

public function fetch_block_content() {
        global $USER;
        $data = new stdClass();
        $data->welcome = get_string('welcomeuser', 'block_name', $USER);
        return $this->render_from_template('block_name/block_content',
                $data);
    }
}

3. Create Mustache template to display the content (block_content.mustache in your templates folder)

<div>
    <h3>{{welcome}}</h3>
</div>

(see example Moodle code for the expected comments and so on).

You can use Bootstrap 4 classes in that template to style your layout.  Of course you can add or pass more data items to your renderer function to build up $data and pass things to the template (url's for example).  More example code can be found here:

https://github.com/richardjonesnz/moodle-block_superframe

Honestly once you get past the initial horror of dealing with a whole three files at once it does get easier . The big thing for me is that the block layout can visualised cleanly in HTML.

HTH

Richard