New Web site ,some advice

[edie209]

I am about to start a rebuild of the school website and I thought it would be good to get some input on things that maybe you would have done differently.

I have a few things that I would like for instance

intergration with active directory for logins

intergration with moodle or another VLE

intergration for the VLE with sims

am I asking too much? is any of this possible?> thats why I want to know your experiences. Maybe together we could put together a difinitive solution to combining the school web site with the VLE solution.

[Norphy]

What is the site going to be used for? Is there any benefit to that level of integration with your AD or your VLE?

[edie209]

Hi Norphy

I want teachers to be able to maintain their own areas of the website so intergration needs to be more for staff than students, and as for the VLE I would like the site to recognise the user and present them with content that is for that particuar user.

[webman]

If you're using a CMS, it will probably depend on it's support for LDAP/AD. If you're rolling your own, it's quite achievable using PHP and/or Apache mod_auth_ldap. Of course, it'll be a lot easier still if it's an ASP site installed on IIS but you'll have to sacrifice functionality

[GrumbleDook]

intergration with active directory for logins

There are a number of CMS out there with AD plugins ... or POP plugins which can be an alternative if you are running an AD integrated mail server. There has been talk about a number of CMS in here recently as the big man looks at what to move EduGeek onto ... have a look at these threads.

intergration with moodle or another VLE

Intergration can come in a variety of methods. It can be a straight forward username/password sharing, it can be the ability to pull information for one system to another. on Moodle.org there are a number of threads about integrating it with Plone and other systems ... At this point you need to look at the availablitiy of web objects that are produced by VLEs that can be dropped onto a compatible CMS.

intergration for the VLE with sims

For this you really are looking at Web Parts ... the MS variety of web objects that are used on Windows Sharepoint Portal or Windows Sharepoint Services ... there are moodle versions being worked on, but Moodle and Capita would be able to give you better advice about the timescale.

Personally ... we presently use FirstClass ... that is not SCORM 2004 compliant and has a number of interesting quirks ... you can build your own applications to pull information from SIMS or other MIS ... or there are a number of companies that can do it for you ... but we are looking at alternatives at the moment ... and probably upting for a combination of WSS, Moodle and ELGG. Be aware that standards fund 121a provides the money for developing this is likely t beheld by your LA as they work on a collaborative platform (words and phrases will be mentioned like scaling, deployment opportunities, developing innovative systems and so on ...)

Speak with your RBC for advice as they may have something ... or have something you can 'pilot' ...

[edie209]

Thans for your replies so far...

I think I will have a look at the plone intergration with moodle. I run two websites myself that use E107 which I like very much but there is no intergration with moodle currently.

Some reading during the holiday me thinks :?

[alan-d]

Thans for your replies so far...

I think I will have a look at the plone intergration with moodle. I run two websites myself that use E107 which I like very much but there is no intergration with moodle currently.

Some reading during the holiday me thinks :?

We are looking at e107 as a front end with moodle as a link from that. That way we get all the bells and whistles from e107 including a content manager if required for other things non curriculum such as staff training for example. We'll then have moodle as a VLE just for curriculum subjects.

Not tested both together yet, that is happening in the next couple of days, but the idea is that we keep moodle for learning purposes and not add unnecessary tables such as calanders. The theory is we keep the number of tables accessed to a minimum when using the VLE.

[edie209]

@alan-d I'm really interested to here how it goes and how you configure the two together. I would love to use E107 as i have been using it for nearly 2 years now.

[alan-d]

@alan-d I'm really interested to here how it goes and how you configure the two together. I would love to use E107 as i have been using it for nearly 2 years now.

I'll let you know as soon as I can - busy sorting out crap RM instructions for QCA stuff into real English at the mo

[alan-d]

OK - update time. Thanks to a few pointers from webman and apeo, we now have an e107 CMS setup running from the root and Moodle running from another partition.

We don't have e107 linked with AD yet, I'm leaving that till we get the real server. However we have linked the Moodle login with the login for e107. Moodle from e107 is just a new site link. I havn't tried to be clever and use iframes or anything.

So far it works a treat.

@ edie209 - If you already have e107 linked to AD then adding moodle to it will be just as easy.

Any pointers or things to watch out for when intergrating e107 with AD would be appreciated. The last time I tried it I fried the prototype site ops: and I had to reinstall it ops:

*EDIT* That was the kiss of death It no longer logs the user into moodle automatically even though moodle is happy to use the same details as the e107 site. (Oh bugger ) A task for the morning me thinks