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

Moodle architecture


We will first look at the overall architecture on which Moodle is based, before we cover the internal components of the VLE application layer.

The LAMP architecture

Moodle has been developed on the open source LAMP framework consisting of Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and PHP (programming language). While Moodle runs on other technology stacks, we will focus on LAMP since it has proven to be the most popular setup among Moodle administrators. Due to the portability of these components and the modularity of Moodle itself (that's what the M stands for), it can support a wide range of operating systems, database systems, and web servers. The following diagram shows a simple overview of the overall architecture:

The lowest level is the operating system. While Linux is the preferred platform, other Unix derivatives such as Solaris and AIX are supported, along with Windows and Mac OS X (preferably the server variants for production sites). Certain...