We currently have a site where our students register for a course and complete their payments through an Australian payment gateway.
They then attend a face to face course and we enter the result into an admin interface which then generates their certificates and archives the results.
I have now created an online site with moodle for the students to undertake some prework and got discussing this with our web developer.
He feels it should be reasonably easy for us to be able to import the student login detail across to moodle for validation (and saving them having two logins), complete the course work and have the grades sent back to the other site for population of the result database.
Is this possible? If so he has asked for me to point him in the direction for a webservice or API to facilitate this process.
If there isn't something ready to use, any recommendations on a moodle developer that might be able to help would be appreciated.
I have done the installation of the moodle site and coded the visual side of things but am not a programmer so struggle with the more technical details.
thanks
Deanne
Have a look at the HMAC-based strategy in the oscommerce integration code. That's the best I can recommend 
For student logins, you can look at the authentication plugins included in Moodle, or look at the 3rd party modules. If none of them will work, you can write your own plugin.
For sending grades, if you want to use web services, there is the OKTech web services plugin, which provides a SOAP interface to some of Moodle's API. I don't know if it supports the functionality that you want, but it should be fairly easy to extend it if not.
If you need to hire a Moodle Developer, you can either contact a local Moodle Partner, or post in the Moodle Jobs database.
For sending grades, if you want to use web services, there is the OKTech web services plugin, which provides a SOAP interface to some of Moodle's API. I don't know if it supports the functionality that you want, but it should be fairly easy to extend it if not.
If you need to hire a Moodle Developer, you can either contact a local Moodle Partner, or post in the Moodle Jobs database.