Moodle: Bulk Deletion Operations

Posted on December 14, 2007 by James Rudd

At the recent CC day some people asked about bulk deletion of users and courses.
Moodle 1.9 beta now supports bulk user operations, such as deleting, sending messages or confirming the account. You can use a filter to easily select the users you want. The Filter allows selection based on everything from name, last access, role, authentication system (manual, LDAP, etc.) to email as well as many other options. Hopefully it will be upgraded in the future to allow filtering by other user attributes such as ID number, Departments, Institution or the new attributes that can be added to users. For Bulk Deletion of courses there is a php file posted by Jeff Church which you can place somewhere in your Moodle installation and run manually to delete your courses. It takes a text file of the courses’ short names to delete, then confirms what to remove before deleting them all. I ran it recently to remove 323 courses from 2005-2006 and it removed them with no problems.

For some useful SQL queries that can be used to identify unused courses please see Some useful Moodle SQL Queries.

Posted in Moodle | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

CC Day T4 2007: Installing and Using Moodle

Posted on December 12, 2007 by James Rudd

This was very similar to a previous presentation given as part of the Tech KNOW Tour. However the Using Moodle presentation has some slight additions from Paul for a more technical audience and the spoken part of my presentation concentrated on a more technical side.

Some additional notes:

To use the DET mail server you can either add mail.det.nsw.edu.au to the mail section of your php.ini file or add it to the
Admin -> Server -> Email: SMTP Hosts section.
If you wish to restrict to sending to DET emails you can add following to the Allowed email domains : “education.nsw.gov.au det.nsw.edu.au“.
Make sure to test the mail server settings before adding any restrictions to domains.

If using Novell or Mac OS you will need to use a different LDAP browser as AD Explorer only works with Active Directory.
For Novell I usually use the free Windows program Softerra LDAP Browser (MSI).
There are a few Java based LDAP browsers that should work with Mac. A good Java based LDAP browser is JXplorer this should work on Mac, Windows and Linux. For some more info on Mac and LDAP look at this article on LDAP in Mac OS X Server from the Mac Dev Center, it is not fully applicable as it also has home drive mapping but it does contain some useful info.

Paul Ganderton has made his Geography HSC site avaliable for guests. You can also view some of the other course on our Moodle site. Look for this logo Guest Accesswhich means guest access is allowed.

Bulk Operations: Some people asked about bulk deletion of users and courses.
This section has been moved to Moodle: Bulk Deletion Operations.

Presentations:

Plugins used by Moodle

Some of the items shown during talk are produced by plugins to Moodle. Below is a list of some of our favourites:

  • Book: Allows structuring resource pages with chapters and pages.
  • Gallery: Shows slide shows and generates thumbnails of images. You can upload a zip file containing an entire folder structure of pictures, and auto-generate albums and sub-albums from it.
  • Course Menu: Creates a Tree Structure as a block on side of page to assist navigation.

  •   SBHS Moodle Library Block (2.3 KiB, 2,693 hits)

    On the main SBHS Moodle page there is also a Library block that sends search queries to our Sentral library page. This will need to be customised by schools to point to their Sentral system or the new DET My Library system (only accessible inside DET WAN). Just modify the block_library.php file to point to your Library search page. To install place the library directory in your Moodle blocks folder.
Posted in Moodle | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Changing MSI filename in a Zenworks Application Object

Posted on December 4, 2007 by James Rudd

In ConsoleOne it is relatively easy to change the path to an MSI but much more difficult to change the file name of the MSI itself.

A trick is to install a second copy of ConsoleOne without any plugins. (I just have link to Clean ConsoleOne.) Using this version you can then Open the App Object and go to the Other tab, and expand zenappPackageName, double click the filename to change.

I use this quite regularly when updating FrontMotion’s Firefox MSI’s. I just keep two object and alternate between them. One production and one testing.

To change the location of an MSI you need to change 2 locations in ConsoleOne (with Zen plugins):

  • Identification Tab (initial page loaded): Administration Package Path
  • Common Tab: Sources: Modify or Add a new source

Make sure all paths use UNC paths. I recommend using Path Copy for this.

Posted in Novell | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Security Templates

Posted on December 3, 2007 by James Rudd

When using Group Policies with Zenworks and Windows XP you may find users are able to create folders and files in root of C:.
This is due to the change in default security settings for drives on Windows XP from 2000.

You need to use the Security Template editor to create a template restricting rights to the C drive and deploy it with your group policies. The same procedure can be used to create a Security Template for use with Active Directory.

Instructions:

Continue reading →

Posted in Active Directory, Novell, Windows | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment