In this course you will learn to make your very own custom block in Moodle. Whether you're a teacher, a trainer, a Moodle administrator, or an IT professional, if you want to learn how to customize Moodle, then this course is for you! This course assumes you've never even seen PHP or HTML before... I will show you everything you need to know to get through your first project.

I will walk you through setting up your own Moodle test environment. We'll write a base plugin, install it, and add it to the Moodle dashboard. Then we'll start to add functionality to your plugin: When this project is finished, it will show different messages in the block for each user who logs in, based on which cohort they belong to.

We're going to learn about three key database tables in Moodle and how to query data from those tables. I will introduce you to the $DB and $USER global objects in Moodle and how to use Moodle's built in functions to display data, including get_records_select(), get_string(), and more.

We're also going to learn some PHP: conditional statements, foreach statements, case statements, string concatenation, and more. I'll explain versioning and how to update your plugin, how to control security for your plugin, and how to add custom strings to your plugin's language file.

Again, even if you've never written any code before, I will walk you through every detail, and you will have access to complete versions all of the plugin files every step of the way. So, if you would like to dive into the world of Moodle customizations, this course is a great place to start.