Just Sharing…Installing Moodle and WordPress MU on (outsourced) School Server

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From the “Jeez, Talking about Life-long Learning” Dept.:

I’m about to learn, messily I’m sure, how to install WordPress MU (for multiple users) and Moodle on a dedicated server (200 Gigs for USD 166/2 years) for our school.

I’ve never done it before. pHp, mySQL, Apache and so forth are as meaningful to me as “tisket,” “tasket,” and “super-cala-fragellistic-ixby-aladocious.”

But I can read. I can focus. I can monitor non-comprehension. I can go to help forums and problem-solve. And, thanks to web 2.0 and the edublogosphere, I can pull network strands as lifelines. (Jeff Utecht, you threw me in these waters, to my lifelong gratitude. But if I start going under here, I’m going to splash in your direction for help ;-) )

I’m just putting this out there for any fellow-travelers, current or future, who might need help from me about all this in the future.

It will be great, when all of this is finished, to have a reliable, uniform, school-hosted K-12 blogging, Moodle, and wiki site for all students. A K-12 web-portfolio for each student.

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  • stephen lazar

    Good Luck! I am undergoing the same knowledge-less journey this summer (probably with ELGG instead of WordPress). Hope it goes well.

  • Alastair

    Hi Clay,

    I’d be very interested to hear how this worked out for you! I was thinking about WordPress MU + Moodle myself.

    Would you recommend it?
    Was it a painful process?
    Any hints or tips you could pass on?

    Regards

    Alastair

    • Clay Burell

      Alistair, this post is ancient history, and much has changed for both Moodle (which I have kept up on) and WPMU (which I haven’t).

      My best advice: be sure whatever host you use has the necessary versions of MySQL and PHP required for both of these. You can get that info from the user forums at Moodle.org (or is it .com?) and WPMU (google it).

      Avoid the servers with one-click installation, unless their versions are of the latest software (they’re usually not).

      Be sure to set your cron jobs for both.

      As for the rest, just learn to ask for help on the forums for both. They’re very responsive.

      Hope this helped and good luck.