Integrating Moodle and Wordpress. A Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) Battle Royale to setup - but well worth it!

Many THANKS to Chris Kenniburg for his hard and generous work
in showing the Moodle community how to integrate Moodle with Wordpress!

Update: This post will only work with Wordpress 3.x. It won't work with Wordpress 4.2.2. For an updated (year 2015) blog post, please go here. Cheers, Frankie Kam.

LTI. Learning Tool Interoperability. 

Remember the term. It's massive. It's here. It's now. LTI is all about integratiing Moodle with external tools and web services. In this post, I'd like to announce that I FINALLY got the Moodle-Wordpress integration to work on my Moodle 2.5 site. Yippee!!!

Now you can blog in Wordpress style, 

without ever leaving your Moodle coursepage!

What this means is that Moodle users can blog in Wordpress inside a walled garden environment (Moodle 2.5). At the same time, the Wordpress url is accessible on the Internet. If you're an English teacher who wants your students to write more, you might be interested in this integration. Imagine having all the world-class benefits of Wordpress blogging, all inside a Moodle coursepage with a shared single-sign-on!

That's awesome and way, way cool. Like totally.

How I speeded up my Moodle site (two essential tips)

Preface
If you are a Moodle 2.x user (Moodle 2.4.1 is the latest as of now - January 2013) looking to speed up your Moodle production site, you might want to check out Cloudways.com's article entitled "Boosting Moodle Performance - Tips To Speed Up Your Moodle Install", Jonathan Moore's excellent "Why Your Moodle Site is Slow: Five Simple Settings",  Frederic Never's equally magnificent "Make your Moodle courses load faster without fiddling with the server" and Jonathan Moore's "Why your Moodle site is slow: five simple settings".

My article below is still useful, but dated since I was using Moodle 1.9.15 during the time of writing. Anyway, I suppose you reading this because you're desperate for ideas to speed up your slow  Moodle site, right? If that is the case, Random Net Surfer, then you've come to the right place!

Credit: Warner Bros

This article was first posted on Moodle.org here on 15th January 2011. At the end of this post, you will know how to speed up your site with mod_deflate. You will also know how to enable PHP caching for your website by installing eaccelerator. Lastly you will know how to monitor your website's resources with munin graphs.

45 days ago, I started by journey of hosting my own Moodle site on a Web Host company. I started off with shared hosting, got turned off by the slow speeds, then upgraded to Virtual Private Server. The site just chugged along but my students complained that the site would load ever so slowly. Now, 1.5 months later, it's a different story.


I have spent countless hours and days, while others are asleep, surfing the Net feverishly for ways to optimize and to speed up my Moodle site. I've surfed to moodle.org, googled my way through, gingerly typed detailed Linux commands along the way. BTW, I love Linux now.

I've experienced hundreds of emails to and from my Web Host company, had a major server outage, times when my domain didn't load, recovered from a full harddisk due to automated & unmonitored backup files (I can't forget that one!), blank Moodle pages, loss of data, recovery and backups along the way. I survived. But TODAY, I think I've finally got it. Henry Higgens of "My Fair Lady" would say, "By George! I think (s)he's got it!!!". Anyway....here are two reasons why I am SO HAPPY TODAY.

Reason1: My Moodle site FINALLY runs with mod_deflate page compression.
So my moodle http requested pages are compressed before they are sent to the users' web browsers. Benefit: faster loading of pages, less waiting by users for their Moodle pages to load. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=165904