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

Networking prerequisites and security


Moodle networking requires a number of additional components to be installed on your servers that deal with secure communication and safe data exchange.

Required PHP extensions

The following elements have to be installed on all Moodle servers that are participating in the network:

  • curl: A PHP library of calls that are specifically designed to safely fetch data from remote sites. If not installed, you have to recompile PHP and add --with curl when running configure.

  • openssl: The OpenSSL PHP library provides encryption functionality without the need to purchase an SSL certificate (--with openssl).

  • xmlrpc: A PHP library that supports remote procedure calls via XML (--with xmlrpc).

It is possible to add trusted hosts to Moodle, which allows them to execute calls via XML-RPC to any part of the Moodle API (Networking | XML-RPC hosts). This is potentially very dangerous and is only meant for developers. We will not be dealing with this functionality in this book...