Book Image

Moodle 4 Administration - Fourth Edition

By : Alex Büchner
Book Image

Moodle 4 Administration - Fourth Edition

By: Alex Büchner

Overview of this book

This updated fourth edition of the classic Moodle Administration guide has been written from the ground up and covers all the new Moodle features in great breadth and depth. The topics have also been augmented with professional diagrams, illustrations, and checklists. The book starts by covering basic tasks such as how to set up and configure Moodle and perform day-to-day administration activities. You’ll then progress to more advanced topics that show you how to customize and extend Moodle, manage authentication and enrolments, and work with roles and capabilities. Next, you'll learn how to configure pedagogical and technical Moodle plugins and ensure your LMS complies with data protection regulations. Then, you will learn how to tighten Moodle’s security, improve its performance, and configure backup and restore procedures. Finally, you'll gain insights on how to compile custom reports, configure learning analytics, enable mobile learning, integrate Moodle via web services, and support different types of multi-tenancy. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to set up an efficient, fully fledged, and secure Moodle system.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Configuring Moodle networking prerequisites

MNet requires three additional components to be installed on all participating servers that deal with secure communication and safe data exchange.

Checking the required PHP extensions

The following elements must be installed on all Moodle servers participating in the network:

  • curl: A PHP library of calls designed to safely fetch data from remote sites. If not installed, you must 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. Trusted hosts are potentially very dangerous and are only meant for developers; we will not be dealing with this functionality here:

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