It’s been a little whilst since I’ve posted and I’ve decided to write a short post about how my Moodle project is coming along. Moodle appears to be one of those applications which I seem to have picked up a natural affinity for – it’s either that or it’s just very intuitive to use!

I’ve been working hard on finishing my masters – writing all the elearning content, creating all the elearning modules in articulate, writing assignments and quizzes – I’ve been incredibly busy to the point where if I am not dreaming of work I am dreaming of moodle! I’ve decided that my Moodle side project is going to be where I upload my final masters project – essentially it will host my elearning course. This means I can kill two birds with one stone, get my side project up and running and also use it to present my uni project.

As a result, I purchased a new domain, I migrated my Moodle site and updated it to version 3.5. The update was quite cumbersome compared to the updates I am used to doing with WordPress. It required me to backup my site, upload a new moodle package (which was painful as my internet continuously dropped out that night for some reason…) and update my version of php. It was a success! And I’m now at the point where I am trying to create my own custom theme. For the meantime I am using the Boost theme, but I MIGHT try to apply some branding to it at some point.

I’ve also finalised and purchased the logo for my new site, created a fancy new front page and managed to create a custom login page which links to my moodle site – whew! I now plan to put my new site on hold for now to continue with my masters.

There are a couple of annoying gripes that I’ve been experiencing with moodle, and I’m not sure if it’s my hosting provider – every so often when I am making changes to the database, I receive an error stating that the database is overloaded. I’ve been googling the issue, but as it only comes up every so often, I can only assume it’s straining the server, usually after about a minute or so I refresh the page and everything is back to normal. I’ve also noticed that my wordpress site has been down on a few occasions – again with database connection errors. Both sites are hosted with the same provider, but they are inside different databases (although I suppose they are probably on the same server too). I’ve also noticed a general slow down in performance…so I think it’s time to raise a ticket with my hosting provider. 

I also had an annoying issue after migration and upgrade where none of my images were displayed – I fixed this by clearing my theme cache. Also none of my moodle data would load after upgrade and fixed this by changing the file path in my config.php file. I think I’m at a good place now, just need to fix the performance issues.