Comparisons and advocacy

Hi David  I was down your way (Leeds) only the other day,at a Moodle conference in fact! We do exactly what you say with our school Moodle - its front page is ouir website and the rest of it is log in only.Take a look ...http://www.olchs.lancs.sch.uk

I'm a teacher not a technician so it isn't fancy in any way and we dont have control over themes but it works for us. What you see on the front page links to guest access courses such as a course called Past Events and we have autologin guests set so they don't need to click for guest access. The course block is not visible to non-logged in users (which I did by editing permissions on the block to prevent ,logged in users seeing it) so only when you login do you see the courses.(Yes Iknow if you know the courses url you can go directly but most people aren't aware of that.) I happen to update the front page myself but this could be done by someone with relevant permissions on the front page and the guest access courses if you wanted to

Hey David,

Yes, absolutely you can do what you want to do. And it doesn't have to be front page only. This, without your courses or student database being exposed to people who are not logged in.

If you've set up Moodle, you've probably discovered that under the moodledata" directory, subdirectory "1" is the front page. Courses are in directories 2, 3, etc. To provide non-logged-in users access, you want to give front page access to any site visitor (it's a set-up choice).

How we've done this is to create a subdirectory in the "1" directory for external pages. By external, I mean pages that were put into the Moodle structure of directories, but NOT created in the Moodle system.

Our directory is "exp" from "external pages." We create these pages that end up in this directory in Dreamweaver. Images are kept in a subdirectory of exp named expimages. Then you link to these pages on the front page with the full url (perhaps from your main menu). It would look something like this:

http://www.yourschoolurl.com/file.php/1/exp/myexternalpage.htm

You also could create this external content on your Moodle server, but NOT inside of the Moodle data structure, which would be less revealing of the document data structure from the outside. Both of these methods work the same for the user.

In this case, put your free access pages in a directory (let's use "exp" again) in the "public_html" directory. If structured this way (which I would recommend rather than the other method), your URL would look like this:

http://www.yourschoolurl.com/exp/myexternalpage.htm

You can build a whole secondary site in this exp directory designed for non-logged in users. This approach does require the use of some web development tool, such as Dreamweaver. You can use PHP and Javascript in the page development for this area. IF you need a CMS/LMS driven development environment, or you want anyone (teachers, support staff, etc.) to be able to produce pages, then you're better off working in a CMS such as Drupal or Joomla. But this is one solution to doing what you want to do if you're trying to avoid the use of a secondary CMS.

KG

Hi David - perhaps take a look at the Flexpage patch - this provides the ability create a fairly rich CMS experience all with Moodle. Intel, Cisco, CalState, etc. have used it for this.