We'd like a custom plug-in to allow media files to be served from other sites, mainly because our students create whopping big Quicktime/Windows Media/MP3 files as part of their course work. We don't want to have those served from our Mahara server if we can avoid it (the students get tons of disk space and bandwidth from the University as a whole).

Here's what I've done so far, and it seems to work, but I want to make sure I'm on the right track:

1) Cloned the blocktype/externalvideo plugin folder to a new folder called externalmedia (not the best name, but it was what came to mind...)
2) Changed blocktype.externalvideo to blocktype.externalmedia everywhere in lib.php and changed the class name to PluginBlocktypeExternalMedia
3) Added some appropriate strings to the lang/en.utf8/blocktype.externalmedia.php (and renamed the file blocktype.externalvideo.php)
4) Put my custom code in lib.php (mainly swiped/modified code from Moodle's multimedia filter), making sure that all user-supplied parameters are run through hsc();

All appears good; the plugin installs and seems to work fine. Am I missing anything?

Also, if I want to remove all traces of the plugin (say, to test a modified version starting from scratch) it looks like I need to do at least:

delete from block_instance where blocktype='externalmedia';
delete from blocktype_installed_category where blocktype='externalmedia';
delete from blocktype_installed where name='externalmedia';

Anything else?

Thanks!

--
Tony Hursh
Technology Coordinator
Curriculum, Technology and Education Reform
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://cterport.ed.uiuc.edu
http://cterfile.ed.uiuc.edu/mahara/view/view.php?id=2