We've covered a lot of different ways to use Moodle in your business, but to make the move to Moodle a success you need to integrate Moodle with your other business systems. Enabling users to use their existing corporate usernames and passwords will make it easier for them to use your Moodle solution. Automating enrollment will reduce your maintenance overhead and enable you to focus on the development of your learning solution. You will also want Moodle to have a similar look and feel to your other corporate systems. The more familiar and easy to use, the more likely it is that users will adopt the system. In this final chapter, we will cover enrollment and authentication plugins and how to customize a theme for your corporate Moodle site.
In this chapter, we shall:
- Learn about the authentication plugins available in Moodle 2.0
- Take two of the authentication plugins and provide detailed examples of how to implement them
- Learn about the standard enrollment plugins in Moodle 2.0
- Take two of the enrollment plugins and provide detailed examples of how to implement them
- Learn about the existing themes in Moodle 2.0
- Learn how to use the theme selector
- Learn how to add header and footer images to your theme
So let's get on with it...
So you have decided to implement Moodle for in your organization. However, how are you going to provide usernames and passwords for all of your users? Is it important to have a single sign-on for all your corporate systems? It is important to determine the answers to these questions before you go live with your Moodle website. Moodle offers several authentication plugins and before we dive into a couple examples, let's briefly cover the different authentication plugins. There are two general authentication types available to you: Internal and external. Internal authentication stores user information locally in the Moodle database. External authentication does not require the user information to be stored locally, but instead uses an external server which you may already be using for your other business systems.
- CAS (Central Authentication Service) server (SSO): This method uses a CAS server to authenticate a single sign-on. If CAS authenticates the username and password, then a user account is created in Moodle with the same username and password.
- External database: This method uses an external database to check if a username and password is valid. This can also be used to fill other user profile fields from the fields in the external database.
- FirstClass, IMAP, NNTP, POP3, and RADIUS servers: This method uses an external server to check if a username and password are valid. If valid, a user account with the same username and password is created in Moodle.
- LDAP server: This method uses an external LDAP server to authenticate the username and password. If valid, a user account with the same username and password is created in Moodle. This module can also use attributes from LDAP to fill other user profile fields in Moodle.
- MNet (Moodle Network) authentication: This enables the sharing of resources between Moodle websites with a single sign-on. This can be set up in your Moodle Network settings and authenticates users according to the web of trust defined in your Moodle Network settings.
- No authentication: This allows users to create their own accounts with no authentication provided by an external server and no e-mail confirmation. This option is not recommended for use due to security and administration risks.
- PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules): This allows you to use the same Unix user database to authenticate user accounts on several different systems. You need to have the Linux PAM or SUN PAM module installed in order for this to work.
- Shibboleth: It is an open-source software that allows single sign on within an organization or across organizations. Moodle provides README instructions on how to set up Moodle with Shibboleth.
- Web services authentication: This allows an external program to authenticate users via web services. You need to have web services enabled in Moodle for this plugin to work.
If your organization uses an authentication method not mentioned in the preceding list, then consider having a custom authentication plugin developed. Moodle's pluggable architecture makes developing new plugins relatively easy.
Now that we have covered the variety of authentication methods available in Moodle 2.0, let's take two authentication plugins from the list above and go into more detail on how to implement them.