Hello Moodlers...

I must say that Moodle is aboslutely fantastic, well you all already know (or should by now know) that!

I have come across quite a few things on Moodle (some problems and solutions and perhaps other creative ways it is useful).

I think it would heavily worthwhile to have a Blog on Moodle for us developers to share the ups and downs of installing Moodle into our institutions.

For example:

I'm on a shared hosted server, and they told me that I was pushing the limits of their servers and must cease immediately. It was through a lot of searching did I find that using dbsessions was the way forward. It took me a while to understand the expiry timestamp in the MySQL database table, but then I found (after a lot of searching) that it counts in seconds from 1st Jan 1970 @ 12:00am.

It was only by doing this was I able to calculate the exact number of seconds that my dbsessions were lasting. This value was nowhere near the value chosen in the Admin->Variables. So I did more searching. I found that I needed to adjust session.gc_maxlifetime in php.ini. Because I'm on a shared server, I had to make this change via the .htaccess file. So I changed this number from 1440 seconds (25 minutes) to 14400 (4 hours) by adding this line:

php_value session.gc_maxlifetime "14400"

This then gave me my 4 hour sessions (after checking against the MySQL table using a nifty Excel spreadsheet I quickly made).

This is only one of the problems I personally had and the solution I found to it.

I could easily see myself creating a Blog on this and I think it would be encouraging if a lot of developers followed suit and it would be an interesting read to see how problems are solved whilst implementing Moodle into live institutions.

There's just my two cents anyways, I hope everyone is running smoothly.

With my best regards,
Kunal Kapoor