Installing Moodle – first step in BAM/MoodleAM

Having received approval to port BAM into Moodle, the first step is to get a Moodle development environment installed on my laptop. I’m meant to be getting a new one this week, however, local IT hasn’t been forthcoming in when this is going to be available. Can’t wait, I only have two days a week to work on this, and today is the last one this week.

What’s the advice

So, what’s the advice from the Moodle community for getting started? I’m going to follow the process embedded in the Intro to Moodle Programming course. What follows is some ad hoc reflections as I’m working through the course.

Unit 1

Found the default text size on the information for “Getting started and General concepts” quite small. Must be getting old.

Okay, at least this has some description of the terminology and “structure” of Moodle, stuff I’ve been looking for for some time.

• Divides Moodle into “system level” and “course level”.
• The interface consists of
  • sections, and
    This is the stuff that goes down the middle of the interface and ends up with a Moodle page being one long list of stuff (bad IMHO). The content of these sections contain text or activities.
  • blocks.
    Created by programmers, installed at a system level and then can be chosen by teaching staff to be added to a course site, usually down the left/right hand side of the page.
• Moodle modules provide the code to control instructional activities – a bit different from a block. The course focuses on block development.

Apparently Moodle is big on accessibility and there is a call for developers to pay attention to this. Not sure it’s quite as big on simplicity and design….

Seems to suggest that Moodle is OO, at least points folk to OOP descriptions.

Points to a couple of tutorials that I’ll need to review (mostly PHP):

• Moodle coding guidlines
• PHP;
• SQL.

The navigation interface to/back from this overview is not great. Using the breadcrumbs I’ve ended up in a different place than from where I started.

Unit 2 – creating and working in the dev environment

:) Vim is included in the Integrated development Environment diagram. At least some of the Moodle folk are real men!. There’s even guidlines for settting Vim up for Moodle development. Funny how small things make you feel better about a system.

Time to install a bunch of stuff – much of which shows how long it’s been since I was a “developer”:

• Firebug
• Selenium and Molybdenum – though I’m not sure how much I’ll use these.
• XAMMP
  Not sure if I really want/need this. I already have versions running, perhaps this is time to move on, or at least keep Webfuse and Moodle totally separate. Yep, didn’t like that MySQL was already running – mysqladmin shutdown, shutdown Apache and all is good..

Misc information

• Document root – /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs
• http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

vim configured for Moodle/PHP – first hello Moodle script created. Time for lunch.

BAM into Moodle approved – starting the process

Received formal institutional approval yesterday to commence the process of porting BAM into Moodle. This has two implications that spring to mind:

1. I get to learn a new development environment; and
   For the last 13-15 years I’ve been doing my development in Perl. In the last 10 years or so, nice OO perl within a framework of my own devising. Now I have take a step backwards to PHP, and from what little I hear fairly primitive procedural PHP.

   I remember having a Perl versus PHP argument through proxy with a “young” developer about 7 or so years ago. I thought PHP was a recipe for horrible code – procedural, mixing HTML and code….uggh. And guess what I’m doing now?

2. There’s finally a fairly clear project/direction for the new position.

Three of the accountabilities for the new position include: relationships, communicate and public and continuous improvement. As part of fulfilling these accountabilities I plan to document the process of porting BAM into Moodle on this blog via the BAM category.

It is possible, that as I learn more about Moodle, that the notion of BAM will change significantly in terms of implementation. i.e. BAM may not become a stand alone module. If there are other tools/services within Moodle that can provide the functionality (and I become aware of them), I’ll lean towards using them.

The plan is to have this completed in time for it to be used from around mid-February 2010. Hopefully earlier.