How do I check if a user is a course creator for a given course? I’m still not 100% sure, the access control policy seems needlessly confusing on first glance and even after reading the heady and mostly pointless, expose on how roles/perms are calculated (Available Here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/How_permissions_are_calculated ) If you notice the section titled “Some Practical Examples” is 100% empty! (I’ve added my code to the wiki so not 100% empty any longer) The most useful part of the docs are completely empty! Instead boatloads of time went into a treatise on the internals and lovely graphs like this one

But you could always hop into the forum dedicated just to this chunk of the code base (Available here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=941&page=0) and search through the 500 topics w/ 5000+(i didn’t actually count) nested discussions (including version 1.7 of moodle as well).

No, instead, ACK came to the rescue and I found a snippet that performed the task.

Without further ado

$context = get_context_instance(CONTEXT_COURSE, $course->id);
if (has_capability('moodle/course:update', $coursecontext)) {
  /** do stuff here */
}

There it is. That could have saved me an hour if mentioned in the docs!

Related posts:

1. My Review of Moodle 1.9 Extension Development
2. Moodle’s Most Important Function Gets No Attention
3. Add User Directories to Apache2 Web Server

/**
 * Create a course and either return a $course object or false
 *
 * @param object $data  - all the data needed for an entry in the 'course' table
 */
function create_course($data) {
    global $CFG, $USER;
    /** omitted for your sanity */
}

Wow, I think I know less about this function now than before I went digging into the code. How do I assign a teacher to my new course, how do I populate the data object it takes as a parameter (is there a course setup function)? Since courses aren’t really objects in Moodle (just glorified arrays), am I just supposed to set them up by hand… $object->param = val?  Are there default values and/or required attributes that need to be set, otherwise my program is going to come to a halt? What about student enrollments? No example to help for how one might actually use this function? Do I have to really read through the code, starting at around line 3260, then jump between the rest of  this monstrous 4000 line piece of spaghetti coded file and try and make sense of it works (somehow).

How is it possible that the most important function (since the core problem Moodle solves is creating courses) in the entire application has no meaningful documentation? I think I have an answer. The entire code base is soooo convoluted and a giant waste of CPU cycles, that it would too embarrassing to actually document how it even works.

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1. How to Check if the Current Logged In User can Edit a Course in MOODLE Using the Has_capability Function
2. My Review of Moodle 1.9 Extension Development
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Source: http://www.serversidemagazine.com/php/how-to-convert-array-notation-to-object-notation

Related posts:

1. Moodle’s Most Important Function Gets No Attention

<?php
$to = "jane@example.com";
$subject = "Hello World!";
$body = "This will be sent from email-addr@example.com";
$headers = "From: email-addr@example.com\r\nX-Mailer: php";
mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);

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date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

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3. Custom Date Formats for Your Rails Application

<?php
// read the post from PayPal system and add 'cmd'
$req = 'cmd=_notify-validate';

foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
  $value = urlencode(stripslashes($value));
  $req .= "&$key=$value";
}

// post back to PayPal system to validate
$header .= "POST /cgi-bin/webscr HTTP/1.0\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Length: " . strlen($req) . "\r\n\r\n";
$fp = fsockopen ('ssl://www.paypal.com', 443, $errno, $errstr, 30);

// assign posted variables to local variables
$item_name        = $_POST['item_name'];
$item_number      = $_POST['item_number'];
$payment_status   = $_POST['payment_status'];
$payment_amount   = $_POST['mc_gross'];
$payment_currency = $_POST['mc_currency'];
$txn_id           = $_POST['txn_id'];
$receiver_email   = $_POST['receiver_email'];
$payer_email      = $_POST['payer_email'];

if (!$fp) {
// HTTP ERROR
} else {
  fputs ($fp, $header . $req);
  while (!feof($fp)) {
    $res = fgets ($fp, 1024);
    if (strcmp ($res, "VERIFIED") == 0) {
      // check the payment_status is Completed
      // check that txn_id has not been previously processed
      // check that receiver_email is your Primary PayPal email
      // check that payment_amount/payment_currency are correct
      // process payment
    } else if (strcmp ($res, "INVALID") == 0) {
      // log for manual investigation
    }
  }
fclose ($fp);
}

I grabbed this script from Paypal Docs… I never can find the info I need w/in their site so I’m posting here for reference. https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/pdn/ipn-codesamples-pop-outside#php

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<?php
$files = array(); $dir = dir(".");
while(false!==($file=$dir->read())):
  if(($file{0}!=".") && ($file{0}!="~") && (substr($file, -3)!="LCK")
    && ($file!=basename($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]))):
      $files[$file] = stat($file); //
    endif;
endwhile;
$dir->close(); ksort($files); ?>

<table border=1 cellpadding=5>
<tr><th>Name</th><th>Size</th><th>Date</th></tr>
<?php foreach($files as $name => $stats): ?>
  <tr>
    <td><?php print $name;?></td>
    <td><?php print $stats['size']; ?></td>
    <td><?php print date("m-d-Y h:ia", $stats['mtime']); ?></td>
  </tr>
<?php endforeach; ?></table>

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$content = file_get_contents("http://php.net/");

print highlight("PHP", $content);

function highlight($match, $string){
  return str_ireplace($match, "<span style='background:yellow'>$match</span>", $string);
}

Will output something like this

Highlighted PHP.Net

***Notice all the styles are gone … would need to parse the document body to maintain stylesheet and other ‘php’ strings that might be in resources paths.

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1. Absolutize Relative Links Using PHP and Preg_Replace_Callback

<?php
$domain = "http://seanbehan.com";
$pattern = "/\bhref=[\"|'](.*?)[\"|']/";
$string = file_get_contents($domain);

// prepends relative links w/ $domain skips returns the match if already absolute
function replace_href($match){
  global $domain;
  if(substr($match[1], 0, 7)!=="http://" && substr($match[1],0,8)!=="https://"){
    return "href='".$domain.$match[1]."'";
  } else {
    return "href='".$match[1]."'s";
  }
}
print preg_replace_callback($pattern, "replace_href", $string);

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apt-get install php5-curl

Otherwise you’ll have to use the fsockopen function. Then it’s just a matter of parsing the XML and getting at what data you want. I just want one status so I’m accessing the element directly, rather than looping over the returned data set.

<php
function latest_twitter_status_message(){
        // grab the rss feed link from some user, like me and indicate the count in the url
	$host = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/11036982.rss?count=1";
	// using curl
	$ch = curl_init($host);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	$doc = new SimpleXmlElement($data, LIBXML_NOCDATA);
	return "{$doc->channel->item[0]->description}";
}

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