(or Why I Wish I Knew the Moodle API…)

I just finished recreating the Parent Portal on our web site that allows parents to enter in their child’s ID and get their five most recent homework assignments in each class.

It’s a total hack because it reads the Moodle databases straight, rather than using the Moodle API. This, of course, meant that the program broke when we upgraded to Moodle 1.8. And this, like many other moments, is why we really need a full-time programmer to do what we really would love to be able to do. I can hack around from time to time, but realistically, I don’t have the time to be able to learn the Moodle and Drupal APIs and then do the kind of coding we need to create the killer app that I know we could. That’s not my job anymore, as much as I still enjoy programming.

We’re really quite close to what we want… this diagram speaks to the dream I have of an educational web app that really could do it all. We’re going to pay VERY close attention to Drupal this year, because the sense I get is that we might want to start using that a lot more than Moodle, but we’ll see. Either way, what we really want is a School Information System database that also acted as a the student information system for any and all apps we would use.

Until then, I’ll just hack code that gets us close, but really, that’s less satisfying when I can see what we need.