This talk presents our findings about best practices for extending the use of Xblocks to accomplish certain goals in open edX courses while keeping your code clean, and maintainable through open edX releases.
We will go in deep into examples of extensions to the platform that use xblocks to create new course pages, that in turn access more than only the xblock scoped data. For example course grades and certificates information.
Type of questions this answers: what kind of info can I access in an xblock? what can I do when the info I want is not in the list? how to best cross the line in the xblock vs app discussion to access more data? requirements and consequences of crossing the line how to keep my codebase modular and extend the platform beyond the course content into the course pages? how to keep complicated extensions to the LMS through xblocks sane and easy to port to newer named releases?
