Is anyone using Moodle and Forum software (such as phpBB)?

Is anyone using Moodle and Forum software (such as phpBB)?

by Kevin Audleman -
Number of replies: 2
My school is preparing to use Moodle as our LMS. In addition to courses, we are going to create an area called The Commons, which will be community forums where students can freely discuss things.  We need a robust, well developed BBS for this, so are looking at running BBS software alongside Moodle.

I'm wondering if anyone else has done this, and if you can give me some advice.
  • What forum software should I use?
  • How tightly can bbs software be integrated into Moodle? Is it possible to do single sign on? Replace the Forum module in Moodle altogether with, let's say, phpBB forums? Use one profile across both packages?
I should mention that we tried setting up our Commons as a Course. The reasons we decided this wasn't viable were:
  1. The forums don't seem robust enough (no way to see 'unread' from the course page, the only way to subscribe to a forum is to get email sent to your inbox, lack of features such as bookmarks and sticky forums)
  2. Moodle doesn't have nearly the level of permissions we would want. We would want students to be able to create new Courses and Course categories, but only in The Commons, something Moodle is not set up to do.
  3. We intend to use a mashup of technologies for other modules, such as a CMS library, del.icio.us tagging as a student-built knowledge base, elluminate for web conferencing, etc. Using the best technology for each purpose, tied together in a loose way, seems to be the winning strategy.
Any thoughts, comments, links to your site would be appreciated!

Thank you,
Kevin Audleman
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In reply to Kevin Audleman

Re: Is anyone using Moodle and Forum software (such as phpBB)?

by Fred Bloggs -

I've got a fair bit of experience with PhPBB (both using and hacking) and I would also prefer this as the forum.

pnMoodle20 seems to offer a part way solution but there's some questions about security (Did this arise from the database crack of PhPBB1.4 -I don't know). Its also not a fully integrated solution rather a few hacks to links by the looks of it.

I'd also be interested in ppl who have used other forum software

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In reply to Kevin Audleman

Re: Is anyone using Moodle and Forum software (such as phpBB)?

by Kent Parker -

Hi, I'm currently exploring this very issue.  Although I haven't done anything about it yet I can see two ways to link a single external forum such as phpBB with ALL courses.

1.  Set up RSS feeds on your forum and display them on your course pages.  It may be possible to link between certain forums and certain course pages by having different RSS feeds on each forum.

2. Create your own block (yes you can do that) using instructions found in your downloads at moodle/blocks/howto.htm, and insert a link and/or RSS feeds into it.

I'll get back to you when I succeed!!

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