In this chapter, we began our Moodle plugin development journey. We started with an investigation of the history of Moodle and the philosophy that underpins it. Having gained an understanding of Moodle, we then learned how to set ourselves up for plugin development. We set up a local development web server based on WampServer and then configured the Eclipse IDE and the Chrome Xdebug plugin for remote debugging.
We spent the second half of this chapter developing a simple dual-language plugin. We followed the plugin development process from user story to deployment in order to understand just a few of the thought processes and decisions that need to be made before plugin development begins.
In the next chapter, we will be delving deeper into the types of plugins that are available and learn how to change the layout of a Moodle course through the development of a custom course format plugin.
