short version: I want to know if there are ways to edit lesson content pages other than the standard interface. If I edit page content by directly updating the database, will that break anything?
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Hi! I'm a novice moodler. Right now I'm trying to use it to put together an online emotion skills course that we're using in some research, and another version of the course that's being used in my institution's wellness program.
In our current system, the most current version of the course content is stored in a shared text document that my collaborators and I are editing. When I want to update the moodle course, I have to go page-by-page through each lesson in the two courses, inserting changes from the text document. Then, if everything works on the development server, I have to do the whole thing twice more on the production server.* It's a painful process -- even with a fast connection, the hundreds of page loads really add up.
I'd like to know if there's any way to edit lesson content pages other than loading each page in moodle and editing them one-by-one. What I'd really like to do is to keep the HTML for the entire course in a single master document, and use a script to update the moodle database to be consistent with that. So, I have two questions:
1) Is there anything that does that, or anything like it?
2) It looks like all page content is stored in one database field, mdl_lesson_pages.contents. If I have a master document that contains each page's ID and the latest version of its content (in HTML), can I just write a script that generates MySQL queries and update the lesson content that way? Or are there other things in the database that I might have to change as well? (again, assuming that I only edit pages that already exist, and that I don't make changes to answer options or anything else).
Thanks much,
- Michael
* I know I could export the courses from one server to the other, but doing that seems to mess up the accounts of users who exist on both servers (not a very helpful description of the problem, but I haven't explored it in detail yet).