Experiments with Moodle

The other day I was asked to help install Moodle for a friend. If you've not heard of it, Moodle is an open source PHP application used (as their site describes) to "help educators create effective online communities." It includes blogs, wikis and content management combined to compliment lesson plans with the synergy of online collaboration and social interaction. I won't get into reviewing the application itself but I will say a few things about my experience with the installation process.

For starters Moodle requires a web server, PHP and a relational database. My goal was to set up the application on an existing Windows / IIS / MySQL shared hosting account on Go Daddy.

To prepare for this activity I decided to take Moodle for a spin on my MacBook Pro where I'm running Apache, PHP 5 and MySQL. The installation required two additional items I was not expecting: a cron job and permissions for the application to write to a special "Data" directory. Nonetheless, the automated setup script worked flawlessly and I was up and running within fifteen minutes.

I naively thought that the Windows installation would be similar. However, no matter what I tried I couldn't get the setup script to run properly. Perhaps due to hosting limitations? Maybe I made a mistake somewhere along the line? One way or another, I was quick to switch to a Linux plan where, similar to OS X, set up was quick and painless.

I know others have had success with Moodle on Windows but all the same I'd recommend a Linux server as the most appropriate vehicle for this application.

Getting Visual Studio 2005 and IIS 5.1 to Play Nice

The other day I installed Visual Studio 2005 on one of my workstations and proceeded to create an ASP.NET web service. For the most part the Casinni webserver that's built into Visual Studio served my testing needs. But I eventually reached a point where I wanted to run the application on IIS just to make sure it encountered no problems in the target environment.

So I installed IIS 5.1 on my Windows XP box and created a virtual directory containing the project. I set IIS to run it as an ASP.NET 2.0 application and was greeted with this error message when I browsed to the .asmx file:

Failed to access IIS metabase.
The process account used to run ASP.NET must have read access to the IIS metabase (e.g. IIS://servername/W3SVC).

I was referred to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article. The problem supposedly happened because the ASP.NET worker process didn't have permissions to the mystery that is the IIS metabase. My guess is that this ocurred because I installed IIS after I installed Visual Studio. Microsoft recommended running the following command line as a remedy:

aspnet_regiis –ga [WindowsUserAccount]

I substituted ASPNET (the ASP.NET account on Windows XP) in for [WindowsUserAccount]. Unfortunately this did not solve the problem and I continued getting the same error mentioned above.

After searching some forums I found others who had encountered this issue who advised reinstalling the .NET 2.0 Framework. I went ahead and did this as follows and it resolved the incident:

• Run the Visual Studio 2005 Disk


• Select "Change or Remove Visual Studio 2005"


• Choose Repair/Reinstall