Installing and upgrading help

Dear Ken,

Thank-you for your comments. Here are my responses.

"I've never understood educators who expect their students to learn something new everyday, excusing themselves from the same thing"

That is what I was asking for in this case, so fair point. That said, I have been learning a great deal about the functionality and limitations of various functions in Moodle. For example, most recently I've learned how to initiate and create a bilingual installation of the Moodle interface, how to use the atto_multilang2 plugin to greatly simplify the language-specific labelling of content, how to use the question bank and create online quizzes and exams (attended a webinar on that one) and I've learned that, although there is not a Moodle-Gsuite integration, there is a Moodle-Wordpress integration called the Edwiser bridge.

"'Assist' means advise? or do you mean 'do for'"

Honestly, initially, I was hoping that someone would "do [it] for me" however, that doesn't stop my interaction/conversation. I am more than willing to go the step beyond to more fully understand the process and individual steps in the process, if the contributor is willing to take the time to educate me or refer me to an information source where I can learn about the various steps involved in doing so that involves "novice" language rather than "expert-informed" language. I would have been equally happy if someone had replied, "Yes it is possible" and here's a link to a help document about how to go about it yourself.

I hope that you haven't found my responses insulting either

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1. Instead of creating a website in G-suite, I created a website using Wordpress. It is my understanding that there is an "Edwiser bridge" that allows you to use a Moodle site within Wordpress (https://edwiser.org/bridge/). This also requires a business plan account, in order to use plugins with Wordpress, so, for right now, I am keeping the two separate entities.

I appreciate you looking for integrations to overcome restrictions, but Moodle is very capable on its own and both edwiser and a wordpress.com business plan cost money.  You could instead put that money into making your moodle available online and solve your original problem. 

I've used the edwiser bridge on a project I set up last year - it works, but I can't see why you need it here. My client had good in house wordpress experience and could easily match appearance up with the rest of their sites, so it was worthwhile. We also used plugins to authenticate users from the national universities here, but you should really keep this as simple as possible and not add unnecessary expense.

You can use custom CSS to make changes to any element you like, but don't expect there to be a button for every one.  If you don't have the time to learn this, you may need to accept what you cannot change and move on.

Boost is just one theme, and not all themes have the same available settings.
You'll need to learn how to identify the block you want to change. 

Most browsers will allow you to inspect the page and take a closer look at what the block is called. 

You can then look for a custom css box in your theme settings and add the identifier and colour:

I'm not sure if a response was posted, my connection timed-out, so here it is again.

"What plugins do you think you need?"

Initially, I was needing to illustrate a bilingual installation of Moodle. I knew that Moodle is available in many different languages but didn't know how to set that up (I do now!).   Although this doesn't take a plug-in, I have been greatly aided by installing the atto_multilang2 plugin, when including multilingual content (There is a similar plugin for use with the MCE editor). I've also been using the atto_morebackcolors and atto_morefontcolors plugins to create coloured content outside of the very basic and boring colour choices offered by the Boost theme.

"Have you organized the material..."

Yes, I have. I was hoping, and I am still hoping, to convince the conference committee of a conference that I was to attend and present at, to create a virtual conference. Purely on my own initiative, I set up and considered all of the elements that I felt might contribute to a good virtual conference experience, such as a Moodle site where participants could get information normally provided in the conference program (topics), exchange information and ideas (I set up several forums to do so), read presenter biographies (glossary), hold virtual meetings, and act as repository for files such as the PP slides and links to multimedia content (Book activity).

"You've been a member of moodle.org for more than 10 years..."

Yes, I have. I first got interested, in Moodle after attending a Cdn MoodleMoot. Coincidentally, at the same time, I was hired as an adjunct faculty member at Concordia University of Edmonton. They were just starting to use Moodle to "augment" course material.  It was entirely optional and very, very few of the faculty took part.  Presently, Moodle is much more integrated in the course delivery and grade submission process. As a result, I have built several courses in Moodle and I continue to learn and advance my understanding of the capabilities and limitations of Moodle with each one.  Finally, onliine learning and open-access options (research, OER, Creative Commons licensing, etc.) is a personal and professional interest of mine so I have toyed with Moodle on home installations throughout this 10 year period.

Cheers and stay safe,
John Lawrence

We don't recommend installers like Bitnami and Softaculous. They're difficult to support. It's not much harder to get a plan Ubuntu instance in AWS and install Moodle using the instructions here.