MDE? (Moodle Development Environment)

MDE? (Moodle Development Environment)

by Mark P -
Number of replies: 5

What are you using to develop Moodle on? I've found Dreamweaver MX to work almost flawlessly with Moodle -- even database managment works as it should. Considering my previous IDE was Notepad surprise.gif, this is a big step!

Is anyone else using Dreamweaver MX? Are there any "gotcha's" to look out for?

Cheers,

Mark

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Mark P

Re: MDE? (Moodle Development Environment)

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
I've tried using MX but for me nothing is faster than two xterm windows running vim with ctags. I've been using Unix and vi for about 17 years so it's like breathing for me.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: MDE? (Moodle Development Environment)

by Greg Barnett -
I'll second that recommendation, but recommend gvim over vim. WARNING: vi is not easy to use until you've used it for at least a month or so. If you can't stand vi, I'd suggest trying emacs. I can't stand emacs, but it and vi (and their various clones) are the best editors.

There is even a bug related to this:
http://moodle.org/bugs/bug.php?op=show&bugid=215

Perhaps a custom .[g]vimrc along with a tags file might be useful additions to the Moodle distribution (or put it in contrib, and put a tarball of that directory on the upload page ala the mysqladmin addon).
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Greg Barnett

Re: MDE? (Moodle Development Environment)

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
I'm not sure I was recommending it exactly, just describing what I use. smile

I like the idea of adding the vim info to the PHP files, though, and have just added something to that bug (and the main library files) about it.

Tags are easy to generate with Unix on individual installations ... just go the main Moodle directory and run "ctags -R" (My file is 300K which is a bit large to include in the distribution ... unless there are some Windows+vi developers who would find it useful.)

In .vimrc add a line to set tags to search local tags, then the global tag file, like:

set tags=./tags,/web/moodle/tags

For those who've never used tags before, it's a very fast way of jumping around code. You place the cursor over a function call and hit Ctrl-] to jump directly to that function. Ctrl-T brings you back again. You can jump several steps away and return one step at a time. The tags file is just an index to keep things fast.
Average of ratings: -