Drupal and Moodle
My company Appnovation got the opportunity to work on an interesting project for the UBC Faculty of Education. This project involves integrating Drupal and Moodle for the students of the faculty. The idea of the project is to allow education students to use Drupal for managing multi-media course files, and to use moodle for delivering the course content to their students.
The Drupal component works with the MCFilemanager module of TinyMCE which allows the students to easily browse and manage their files. The simple interface makes it easy for the students to learn how to operate the site. Other features of the Drupal site includes internal communication amongst teachers and also educational content management. The moodle component of the system is for delivering the course content to the classes.
The challenge of the project is related to a single signon system across both platforms and the creation of a single user registration system. Also, the user private multimedia files are stored on a directory identified by their Drupal user id. This means that we will need to create a custom application in Moodle for picking up that person's user id, and then retrieving the files from that directory.
Our solution to that issue was to create a joint table for linking the Drupal user information with the Moodle user information. We have also created a custom module for hooking into the Drupal user module so as to allow for a single user registration system.
From the project, we realize the potential for linking open source platforms together. While Drupal has a course management module, we do not think that it has as much power as the Moodle system. It appears to us that integration across different open source platform is the way to go.
