Installing a Moodle Test Site The painless and easy way.

What is Moodle? Moodle is not a new cross breed between a poodle and another dog! Moodle is a course management system. A course management system is a type of software that can create and deliver course content to students through the Internet. Course management systems can also track student enrollments, allow students to enroll for classes online and track student usage and grades

How are course management systems used? Students log into a specific web site to access the courses they have registered for with a given username and password. Instructors upload the contents of their courses onto the site for students to access. This can include syllabi, weekly readings, quizzes and tests, Powerpoint presentations or links to web sites. Instructors can have "virtual office hours" using chat software or can use online forums for students to discuss weekly forums.

Other Course Management Systems Course Management Systems started to become popular around There are several to choose from including: Blackboard WebCT Sakai Angel LMS Scholar360 JoomlaLMS Desire2Learn Moodle

The Appeal of Moodle Of all of the products listed only Sakai and Moodle are "open source" or "free". For some institutions, due to budget issues free is the best solution.

What next? Many people feel comfortable doing a local installation of a new product to try out before doing a "full" or "live" installation. In other words installing a program on one computer or a local area network as opposed to making the program available online for all to see.

What is a local installation? A local installation means an installation on a local computer as in just on your own personal computer. When something is installed locally, it is not available to everyone else on the Internet.

Why a local installation first? To see what features a product has and how well they work. This way an organization can see if it suits the needs of the organization. To see how easy or difficult it is to use the product before going "live”.

Why Moodle for a CMS? Moodle is free and a local installation of the Moodle CMS can be quite simple and done quickly. There are even a few shortcuts one can take to make it even simpler!

What Moodle needs to operate. Moodle was developed with a Linux system using Apache, MySQL and PHP. Moodle can be used with Windows XP/2003/2000/, Mac operating systems and Solaris 10. A web based server software will be needed. In this case we will use Apache. A database server. Here we will use MySQL.

First Steps: Installing Apache and MySQL Once there was a time when one had to do this the "old fashioned way“ and install everything and play with configuration files but now there are programs that install Apache and MySQL all in one for you such as: Xampp from Apachefriends.org or Wamp Why make things more difficult? In this case we are going to use one of those programs, Xammp from Apache Friends. Go to:

When you get to apachefriends.org this is what you will see on the page

Choose your version of Xammp Under "jump off point", choose your download. Here we will choose "Xammp" without Add-ons and not Xampp-Lite. Clicking on Xampp will bring you further down the page to Xampp Windows Basic Package where you can choose, the Installer, Zip package or Exe, self extracting package. We will choose the installer.

Downloading the program. Sometimes when you are running Windows, the system will try to block any downloads. Click "download file" to allow your download to continue. You will be asked if you would like to download this program and where. Click yes and save to your "C" drive. (or whichever drive is your main drive, it could be "D" or "E")

Finding where you saved the program! Go to "my computer" Click on "C" whichever is your main drive. Scroll down until you see xampp-win installer. Double click on that installer and click on "run". Xampp will ask to please select a language, choose your language and click ok. Then click "next" and choose your installation folder. In this case put the files into "C" (or again whichever is your main drive).

Xampp installation If saving to "C" the destination folder will be "c:xampp" Click "next" and choose which services you would like to have installed on your machine. In this situation we would like Apache and MySQL. Simply click on "install Apache as a service" and "install MySQL" as a service" under the service section. Then click "install" and let the work be done for you. Click "finish". The programs will check the necessary ports to make sure they are open and working for you.

After installing Xampp successfully. Apache and MySQL have been installed and you should see the following control panel:

Next step. Getting ready to install Moodle. Go to es and scroll down to "install complete package". Click on the link for "download Windows" packed zipped file. This requires you to have a zip extraction file program. There are free programs if you do not have Winzip available to you. WinRAR Archiver Cam Unzip These are just two of the zip programs available.

Downloading and extracting Moodle. Download the file to your main drive (again in this case I choose "C" for others it could be "D" etc) Go to your extraction program and extract the programs to your drive of choice, in this case I choose "C". You can choose for the file to be named whatever the default is say "C":moodle" or rename it if you choose to say "C:moodle21" Click "ok" and the extraction process will begin.

Moodle installation begins. Go to “my computer” and click on “C” You will now see a list of folders including one titled "moodle" Double click on that folder. You will see another folder titled “moodle”. Double click on that folder again. Now you should see a dos file titled setup_xampp. Click on that to start xampp. This configures xampp for you. Now click on xampp-start. This starts the Xampp services for you. Don’t worry about turning anything off, it does this all by itself.

Trust me we are almost there Type in the following address in your web address bar and you should see the screen on the next slide. This next set is to set up the databases for Moodle using MyPhpAdmin in one easy step.

Creating the Moodle database with PhpMyAdmin On the left hand side there will be a menu. Under "tools" choose phpMyAdmin and click. You will see "create new database appear in the main menu" In create new database type "moodle153" and click create" You will now see a new screen where your new database has been created.

Final steps Locate the file folder downloaded from Moodle, in this case “C”, and copy the file to the Windows clipboard. Open the Xammp control panel by clicking on "explore". A windows explorer window will open. Extract the Moodle files into the htacess files by copying them into the htacces file folder. The next slide will show what the final result looks like.

The Real Installation of Moodle. Now you can begin the real local installation of Moodle. In your web browser type the path to where you saved your folder. In this case we will type: and will see the following on our computer screen:

Passing Inspection Choose your language with Moodle and click “next” The next step is having all of your settings checked. They should all pass, and you will see the word pass next to each setting. Click next. The next slide illustrates this process.

Set the path for your site. Next you want to set the path for your web site. Since this is a local site The Moodle directory will automatically be filled in. The data directory will automatically be filled in. The next slide will illustrate how this will look.

Database settings The first box says "type" choose sql. Fill in the name of the host server, in this case,"localhost". The database is Moodle153. The user is root. The table prefix is usually already set. Click “next” since the configuration is done. See next slide for how this will look.

A local Moodle site for Ex Libris I set up a Moodle site on my computer locally for Ex Libris this weekend. The next two slides show the site. My next goal is to get it online.