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Developers - extending Mahara ?


anonymous profile picture
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Posts: 19

01 December 2008, 5:20

HI there,

I work for a school in Huddersfield, UK, and we have currently integrated Moodle and Mahara for SSO. My manager would like me to add various functionality to Mahara. I'm just wondering - do you have any developer documentation? Are there any APIs by which i can do things 'properly' ?

 Many thanks,

 Dan Ballance.

anonymous profile picture
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Posts: 19

01 December 2008, 11:30

Hi Malcom,

Small world! I work for Royds Hall High School in Paddock, Huddersfield. I also develop Moodle for Batley Girls, Shelley College and Spring Grove (a primary).

Getting a little fustrated at the moment that Moodle and Mahara aren't more 'developer friendly' - by which I mean providing a modular/plugin type architecture and apis for developers. Certainly with Moodle, at least, I find myself having to modify the core code far too often (imho).

 I would point to examples like Joomla and Magento as php based systems which are far more  'developer-friendly'.

 cheers,

dan

anonymous profile picture
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Posts: 1643

01 December 2008, 16:27

Both Moodle and Mahara as modular with plugin architectures, but at the same time they're not generic CMS systems so you won't get everything under the sun being able to be plugged in ;).
anonymous profile picture
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Posts: 1643

01 December 2008, 16:32

Hi,

This website was recently relaunched primarily because of this reason. Currently we've got very little documentation because of a few reasons:

  1. It's only recently that people have began developing with Mahara in earnest, and thus expressing their desire for documentation
  2. Consequently, we had been focusing on development, getting Mahara to a good feature set, rather than documentation. Don't forget Mahara's only 2 years old!
  3. The old wiki sucked :)
In any event, about now is the time when we shall begin to add documentation about how everything works to the new wiki. I hope we can see much progress in the next couple of months.
anonymous profile picture
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Posts: 19

12 December 2008, 5:08

Ok, that's great, I shall be watching closely, thanks :-)
anonymous profile picture
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Posts: 19

08 January 2009, 8:35

Ok, here's a specific question: I want to develop a new block type for displaying in views. Can you point me towards any documentation to guide me through this process?

 I really like the system so far as I delve through your code.  In my vey humble and tiny opinion - I think it is of a much higher calibre than Moodle.

 Let's have some developer docs and i can get cracking !

 cheers,

dan :-) 

anonymous profile picture
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Posts: 228

08 January 2009, 9:43

Hi Dan

I just ported over  the blocktype documentation from the old wiki to here:

It may be slightly out of date, but is a good starting point.  If you find it is out of date, or missing anything, please update it as you go!

Hope that helps,

Penny

anonymous profile picture
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09 January 2009, 5:48

Hye, that's great news, thanks, I will get reading this now :-)
anonymous profile picture
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09 January 2009, 6:09

Also, while i'm at it, is there any documentation for creating new artefacts?

 cheers,

 dan ;-) 

Heinz Krettek's profile picture
Posts: 480

09 January 2009, 7:08

Hi Dan,

i think you speak about new blocktypes? Wink

To create a new artefact is easy, copy a jpg into your datafolder and you have created a bew artefact.

Penny will know where to finde the documentation about buildung blocktypes. Is it in the old wiki?

just found this above: Cool

Hi Dan

I just ported over  the blocktype documentation from the old wiki to here:

It may be slightly out of date, but is a good starting point.  If you find it is out of date, or missing anything, please update it as you go!

Hope that helps,

Penny

 

cheers
Heinz

 

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