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

Enabling web services for external systems


An external system is any application that accesses Moodle and its data in one way or the other. There are eight steps that have to be performed to complete the setup, which follow the workflow described on the web services overview screen:

Create a specific user

Each application should have a separate user account. This way, you can control the capabilities that each external system is going to use. Our user is aptly called web service.

Check user capability

Depending on the protocol you've selected, you have to allow the respective permissions for the user. You achieve this by creating a new role with any of the four capabilities, webservice/amf:use, webservice/rest:use, webservice/soap:use, or webservice/xmlrpc:use. This role has to be assigned to the web services user(s) in the System context.

Select a service

A service is like a defined interface that an external application can connect to. It is a set of functions, which are covered next. Selecting...