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)

Enabling web services for external systems

An external system is an application that accesses Moodle and its data in one way or another. Eight steps have to be performed to complete the setup, which follows the workflow described on the web services overview screen:

  1. Create a specific user

Each application should have a separate user account. This way, you can control the capabilities each external system will use. Our user is aptly called webservice.

  1. Check user capability

Depending on the protocol you’ve selected, you must allow specific permissions for the user. You achieve this by creating a new role with any of the three capabilities, webservice/rest:use, webservice/soap:use, or webservice/xmlrpc:use.

This role has to be assigned to the web service user(s) in the System context.

  1. Select a service

A service is a defined interface that an external application can connect to, represented by a set of functions (see step 4). Selecting...