Book Image

Moodle 3 Administration - Third Edition

By : Alex Büchner
Book Image

Moodle 3 Administration - Third Edition

By: Alex Büchner

Overview of this book

Moodle is the de facto standard for open source learning platforms. However, setting up and managing a learning environment can be a complex task since it covers a wide range of technical, organizational, and pedagogical topics. This ranges from basic user and course management, to configuring plugins and design elements, all the way to system settings, performance optimization, events frameworks, and so on. This book concentrates on basic tasks such as how to set up and configure Moodle and how to perform day-to-day administration activities, and progresses on to more advanced topics that show you how to customize and extend Moodle, manage courses, cohorts, and users, and how to work with roles and capabilities. You’ll learn to configure Moodle plugins and ensure your VLE conforms to pedagogical and technical requirements in your organization. You’ll then learn how to integrate the VLE via web services and network it with other sites, including Mahara, and extend your system via plugins and LTI. By the end of this book, you will be able to set up an efficient, fully fledged, and secure Moodle system.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Moodle 3 Administration Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

System security


In this section, we deal with configuration settings, login via the secure HTTP, the IP blocker, and the Safe Exam Browser integration.

Configuration security

There are a number of general configuration settings that potentially have an impact on the security of your system.

Access to dataroot

In the Notifications screenshot at the beginning of the chapter, you would have probably spotted the warning that the dataroot directory is directly accessible via the Internet. Moodle requires additional space on a server to store uploaded files, such as course documents and user pictures. The directory is called dataroot and must not be accessible via the Web. If this directory is accessible directly, unauthorized users can get access to content.

To prevent this, move your dataroot directory outside the web directory (ensure not to mangle permissions) and modify config.php accordingly by changing the $CFG->dataroot entry.

In externally hosted environments, it is often not possible to...