PHP Training Course

We've just finished providing a week long PHP training course for OpenAdvantage. We had a fully booked course, and it appeared to go very well.

We're tired.

Moodle

Three things have happened with regards to Moodle recently, which possibly seem worth writing about :

1. A friend received a cease and desist letter from someone at moodle.com moaning about his use of 'Moodle Services', 'Moodle hosting', 'Moodle training', 'Moodle Consulting' and 'Moodle installation'. It appears they have a wide ranging trademark. While I understand there is a benefit to having commercial 'Moodle partners', Moodle has it's roots in the open source community - it seems rather short termed and defeating to restrict the online visibility of Moodle related resources. (Trademark registration).
2. We've been using Moodle to deliver our training courses, and are using it for our current PHP training course at OpenAdvantage. Last night it suddenly stopped working, and only gave a vague error message about the database - after much rummaging around, I discovered that the lib/setup.php file was disabling PHP's error_reporting and the DB password was somehow incorrect. </sigh> While rummaging through Moodle I was rather disappointed that it appears to have no decent logging infrastructure (I couldn't find any way to get it to log any sort of helpful message to a file). Thankfully re-enabling error_reporting fixed the problem.
3. I integrated mod_auth_pgsql with Moodle to allow me to restrict access to our training materials (the slides etc are all kept outside of Moodle in SVN). It seems to work, and was quite easy to setup.

Here ends the lesson.

intro:
Hopefully helpful guide to using your subversion repository to automatically populate your Moodle 'Files'