Danny's Weblog

Actually, Joomla *can* work with Moodle

In a previous article I confessed that I had mistakenly assumed that Moodle was module-compatible with Joomla: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Computers/Internet/Joomla]

Actually Moodle *does* have a degree of compatibility with Joomla, in that Moodle can be installed so that it runs "inside" Joomla, at least as far as the user sees it. Right now that capability seems to be poorly documented and liable to break things, but apparently some people have made it work. For instance, they can share the user/password database. (phpbb can do the same thing, although regrettably phpbb has fewer restrictions on usernames so you usually can't import existing phpbb users into the Joomla system.)

Actually, I think it's probably better *not* to share the user database for my purposes, but it's good to know it's not impossible.

See eg discussion here: moodle.org [http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=20080]

Apparently features like this are called "integrations" in Moodlespeak: download.moodle.org [http://download.moodle.org/modules/integrations.php]

I had been vaguely looking for this stuff under "modules". Silly me!

The "filters" category is a little thin, but you should check it out. For instance, you can install a filter that turns TeX code into GIF images: hmmm...

I made a silly mistake with Joomla

No, not with the patch (as far as I know just yet).

For some reason I got it into my head that Joomla was compatible not just with Mambo but *also* Moodle. I'm not good with names so I guess I just remembered them as "silly sounding name N". As far as I can see, while Joomla and Mambo are still compatible (at least for now), Moodle is a *completely separate product*.

This is a pity because actually *Moodle* has the education features I need.

Fortunately Moodle was easy to install and has been flawless so far (not very far) and I think I may maintain *both* systems for a while. It might be good to have a *total* separation between the public features and the features for paying customers.

Patching Joomla 1.03 to 1.04

I was puzzled about how to *apply* this patch, even though pretty clearly it was the file I wanted (the filename was after all Joomla_1.0.3_to_1.0.4-Stable-Patch_Package.tar.gz). It just said something about "put this in your Joomla directory".

Having dealt with tar files before, I suspiciously checked the directory structure inside the tar file. It corresponded to the directory structure inside the Joomla directory. So (in fear and trembling) I went ahead and ran tar -xvzf | less.

After maing the disappointing discovery that on my new server "less" appears to be symlinked to "more" instead of the other way round, I could see no error messages.

Then when I tried to run it from the browser, everything seems to work fine and it does say version 1.04.

I don't know quite how this really worked. For instance, I noticed a new htaccess file in there, but I assume it has to be manually copied to .htaccess.

Likewise, the files are marked owner/group "pasamio" inside the tar file but of ocurse were created with my default owner/group when I untarred them. I think I'm just lucky that happens to be OK for this webserver.

Setting up Joomla

I recently set up another site. One reason I chose my hosting vendor was that they had Joomla via web-based install: I figured I didn't really need web-based (in fact I hate web interfaces for admin) but it probably meant that they had several users already running it.

It basically worked ok. Some observations so far:

1. Joomla actually has surprisingly little documentation. For instance, I couldn't find anything that explained which visible items were part of the base install and which were part of the template.

2. The site logo, at least with one template I checked, isn't even defined by HTML, but in css. It took me a long while to find it (it didn't help that I kept thinking there must be an easier way to track it down as I pored through HTML, PHP and CSS).

3. Even when features *are* accessible via the administrator's web interface, it's not obvious *where* they are in the interface. I found myself wishing for some sort of feature where you could hover the mouse pointer over an element and it would pop up a little window that told you how to edit it. Or documentation.

4. So far it's been stable. I'm fairly impressed.

5. The update process is a little scary. Why do they give you a windowing interface and handholding to do trivial stuff you could do faster at the command line, but to do a security update you have to manually overwrite every changed file on the site? Oh and by the way, there's no readme file to explain exactly how to overwrite it. What happens if you *edited* some of those files?

6. I'm surprised – considering all the hype about Joomla – how few features there are. I was assuming there would be software to create class packages; payment modules; test result analysis... but about all there is seems to be timed release of content and user registration.

7. Huh – I noticed something in the sourcecode about creating PDFs, and now I found that if a user goes below a certain level in the hierarchy, a content item gets a clickable PDF icon – and it seems to work (although for some reason Firefox crashes if Adobe Reader is *already open* – go figure).

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