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Best Practices in Best Practices in Moodle Administration Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President Remote-Learner

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Page 1: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Best Practices in Moodle Best Practices in Moodle AdministrationAdministration

A variety of topics from technical to practical

Jonathan MooreVice President

Remote-Learner

Page 2: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Moodle 1.9 Extension DevelopmentDevelop your own blocks,

activities, filters, and organize your content with secure code

Thoroughly covers key libraries of Moodle and best practices to use them

Explore the Moodle architectural concepts, how it is structured, and how it works

Detailed examples and screenshots for easy learning

Page 3: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Background and ContextBackground and Context

Origin of Practices Nearly 1,000 hosted organizations Approximately 3 million hosted user

accounts Dedicated technical and instructional

teams Using Moodle since 1.0

A variety of topics from technical to practical for Administrators

Page 4: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Know What is Happening on Know What is Happening on Your ServerYour Server

Monitoring: Cacti SNMP monitoring Round robin log storage

Alerts and Notifications: Nagios SNMP alert system Have your servers page or text you!

Page 5: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

RolesRoles Do not change built in roles

Remember reset defaults option Know what level to apply roles at

Admin: global Course Creator: global, or category Student, Teacher: course

Know what level capabilities work at Make new roles by copying most similar

existing role

Page 6: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Easy performance optimizationsEasy performance optimizations

Run a PHP accelerator eAccelerator and APC up to 10x performance improvement

MySQL Query caching Increase buffer sizes

Set Server-> System Paths Batch cron.php runs for multiple

Moodles Check state of indexes and bigints

Page 7: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

A Better Way - AutomationA Better Way - Automation Great combination: LDAP authentication

with external database enrollment External authentication

Automate account creation LDAP/Active Directory and Database

Enrollment Plug ins Automate course creation Automate teacher assignment Automate student enrollments

Synchronization scripts

Page 8: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

BackupsBackups Recommend against using the internal

automated course backups due to performance issues.

Internal Moodle Backups not for disaster recovery

Elements of a Moodle Backup Moodle software Moodle data folder SQL data

Moodle yesterday instance

Page 9: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Platform SelectionPlatform Selection

Linux most used for scalability Windows significantly lower performance

for PHP apps Mac OSX forking performance issue

Apache and MySQL concurrency issue

Page 10: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Issue TrackerIssue Tracker

Use notification screen to confirm version

Moodle Issue Tracker Vote for bugs Set a Watch your important bugs

Page 11: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

phpMyAdmin phpMyAdmin

Useful and powerful, but dangerous Useful to pull reports not built into

Moodle Change settings values not in GUI Fix Moodle when “broken” by user error Reset administrator password if locked

out

Page 12: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

MyODBCMyODBC Windows client software Connect MySQL to desktop applications Make ad hoc reports in MS Access,

Excel, Open Office, etc.

Page 13: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Various Other Admin ToolsVarious Other Admin Tools

Moodle debug General debugging Performance debugging

phpinfo – confirm your php build iperf – test your network iostat – linux disk usage stats strace – see what a process is doing

Page 14: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Custom Development and Custom Development and ModulesModules

Don't load modules just because they are Don't load modules just because they are availableavailable

Use modules over “hacks”Use modules over “hacks” Use the forums to evaluate modulesUse the forums to evaluate modules Use the author's profile to research the Use the author's profile to research the

creatorcreator

Page 15: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Security Security Select Enterprise class OS with long term

update support. Automate updates Moodledata outside of web root Try mod_sec Consider using weekly stable cvs for

Moodle auto updates Consider forced logins HTTPS logins

Page 16: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

More SecurityMore Security

Consider turning off self registration Set the Mysql root user password See Moodle Docs Security Page

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Security

Page 17: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Email deliveryEmail delivery

Make sure you have valid reverse DNS Make sure you have permission to send

email for primary administrator's email account

Use email debug to help diagnose problems.

Page 18: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Custom themesCustom themes

Start with a basic theme Copy existing theme to a new folder

name Prevents upgrades from wiping out

Page 19: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Location and LanguageLocation and Language

Use geography based time zones over UTC (for new US daylight savings time)

Set an appropriate default language language (fix “spelling errors”) default is UK English

Page 20: Best Practices in Moodle Administration Best Practices in Moodle Administration A variety of topics from technical to practical Jonathan Moore Vice President

Questions?Questions?