Creating a new grade report

Moodle is so fickle! Programming in general is a very fickle endeavor, I get that. I am creating a second custom grade report for my spoiled, overwhelmed, don't have time to search for the information in moodle, teachers.  To *save myself a little setup time, I simply copy and paste the progress folder I created a couple weeks ago, then set off to make updates in a couple key places.

I browse to my rd instance, open the webroot and browse to www\moodleinstance\grade\report, there I see the progress plugin created a couple weeks ago.  I copy and paste the folder in place and end up with a new directory called progress - copy1.

If you follow the moodle docs on development of plugins, you have a decent roadmap of what needs to be updated. This gradebook reports page describes a similar process.

The highlights are:

1 - Change the name of the copied folder (directory) to something, in my case notgraded.

2 - change the name of the language file in the lang\en folder, adhering to the strict rule for gradebook report plugins like this:  gradereport_notgraded.php, where notgraded is the EXACT PRECISE name of the folder.

3 - edit the db\access.php file, changing the capability array to point into your renamed folder, like:
$capabilities = array(
    'gradereport/notgraded:view' => array(
        'riskbitmask' => RISK_PERSONAL,
        'captype' => 'read',
        'contextlevel' => CONTEXT_COURSE,
        'archetypes' => array(
            'teacher' => CAP_ALLOW,
            'editingteacher' => CAP_ALLOW,
            'manager' => CAP_ALLOW
        )
    )
);

4 - Update the version # in the version.php file located in the root of the plugin folder. Increment the last digit, like this: 
   $plugin->version   = 2011112900;  to
   $plugin->version   = 2011112901; 
   This forces the moodle plugins check to run.

5 - Update the plugin name in the language file, it is used in 4 places in the moodle interface. Like this:
    $string['pluginname'] = 'Items Not Graded';

 
If you did these things correctly, you should see in your gradebook a new option like this:

 
 
 





And that is the *easy part, just so very fickel.  Once you have the *shell for the new grade plugin created, now you can set off to complete the actual coding to solve the program, create the report that you intended.  This will almost always look like creating or in this case editing the index.php file at the root of the folder and adding your programming there.