Hardware and performance

Several reasons, here are a few:

I have created a CD version of my moodle, so that folks offline can do the courses. The CD loads an apache, mysql, and php server to their machine with the moodle in the htdocs. Everything works except that the absolute references point to the server used when creating the courses.

The same issue arises when you want to transfer a moodle from one server to the other (by just copying the moodle files and dumping the sql). Again, all absolute references are incorrect on courses created on the other server, since they are saved as those absolute, not relative addresses.

You might respond just use the backup/restore facility. That will not work for the first example (I would not expect my users to be expert admins), and is cumbersome for the latter.

Changing wwwroot doesn't help once you have saved any image reference (as in the editor).

//This is what I place in mod/lesson/view.php just above the print_simple_box(format_text($     ...usually $page->contents

//$new_text is whatever you have done to $page->contents

$content_array=explode("http", $new_text);
for ($i = 1; $i <= count($content_array)-1;  $i++)
{
//most people install into a directory called "moodle", so ...

    $moodle_pos=strpos($content_array[$i],"moodle/")+7;
    $rest = "../../".substr($content_array[$i],$moodle_pos);
    $content_array[$i]=$rest;
}
$new_text=implode("",$content_array);