03 March 2009, 15:34

Hi. I quickly found myself getting the impulse to post a new question every 1/2 hour, but instead I jotted down a bunch of things that have come to mind as I am laying out my battle plan on doing my mahoodle for goginet.com.  I was hoping to be able to pick everyone's brain alittle before I get too far down one road or the other.  To summarize what I am doing:

My site goginet.com is in alpha stage, so I have the ability to take the moodle part of it down, rearrange everything, etc.  Functionally and conceptually my site has three main areas - learning, support, and action (which I will rename community).  So I think my first step is to create three subdomains from my main domain as follows:

• www.goginet.com  - this now goes to my moodle homepage (or customized mymoodle page if logged into moodle), but I will probably change this to be a php/css/jquery driven page.
•  learning.goginet.com - my moodle install
• community.goginet.com - my mahara install
• support.goginet.com - currently I use a moodle course and its forum system, but will probably start using a mahara group or groups and its forums. This subdomain woudl give me flexibility in future. 

Ok, so here are my questions - please jump in on any or all - thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Q1. Is there anything advantages or restrictive about choosing to SSO from moodle to mahara OR mahara to moodle?  As I said, I can change my approach right now. 

Q2. Can they login using either login page (moodle / mahara) for the single login to work, or is mahoodle resticted by the SSO direction choosen in Q1 above? 

Q3. It doesn't look like there is special redirection to a special page when you log into mahara (unlike in moodle when you have option of using a mymoodle page for logged in users as their "home" page). Is anyone using any kind of redirect or special landing page on login?

Q4. Are tag clouds implemented yet to take advantage of mahara tags for various items they are prompted for - or is this something I will need to program on? (I love tagging)

Q5. Is there a way to easily search just on forums in mahara?

Q6.  Is everyone an automatic member of the community group, like on mahara.org itself? If so, is the group/groups automatically joined an option set by admin user somewhere?

Q7. The SSO Peer link on either the moodle or mahara block, does that HAVE to land on a certain URL on the other site, or can you have lots of direct links? For example, can I have a link in a menu to say, support, that makes that SSO connection, but lands me in a specific group page/forum?

Q8. Kind of related to that is this and the next question. Are the user numbers shared between the two systems? That is, is user=5 the same on both systems, for easy linking?

Q9.  Forums. I can make a group visible to the public, but it doesn't permit me to addrecent forums posts or anything to that view page. Does this mean forums can't be seen publically? Also, is there a way to search just forums in a specific group?

Q10.  Messaging - I know this is probably a ways off, but thought I would ask if messaging is interoperable now between moodle and mahara? That might be confusing to users...

Q11. If you had a time machine and could go back in time, what year would you visit and why?

Just had to throw that last one in... can't be all work and no play Thanks again for your advice, wisdom, thoughts, experiences,

Jamie

 PS I would go back to April 14th, 1561, Nuremburg Germany. To see what really was in the sky that day.

03 March 2009, 17:33

A1: As far as I know doing the SSO from Moodle to Mahara or the other way around is equivalent in terms of functionality.

A2: Yes, if properly configured, they can login in any of the two and SSO to the other.

A3: Even if the MNET code allows us to specify a landing page (if I'm not mistaken), neither Moodle nor Mahara are using that feature as of now. So you currently land in the front page.

A7: You could land on any URL at the other end (using the wantsurl parameter), but you'll need to write the full URL by hand, as the current Moodle/Mahara SSO blocks only land on the front page, as stated in A3.

A8: They may not be the same. Both systems are independent, even if they are interconnected.

Saludos. Iñaki.

03 March 2009, 17:47

Hi,

about A3 :

I installed moodle 2.0 and mahara 1.1 to do the portfolio export. Here you find a link to land in the "incoming" folder of Mahara. Great stuff.

Cheers Heinz

03 March 2009, 18:10

03 March 2009, 17:50

Hi Jamie,

there is a group Moodle Mahara  Integration to handle your questions.

One big advantage of Mahara is the possibility to create groups for special issues. So let's us use this feature.

cheers Heinz

03 March 2009, 18:10

Cool!!!! Thank you Heinz. I will ask the same thing over there in the Moodle Mahara Integration group

Anyone who wants to answer or read the answers others give, it will be in that forum. I feel bad about "cross posting" , but I didn't know that group was there

Jamie