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Starting from Moodle 2 the task of installing your own Moodle on free shared hosts is becoming kind of difficult compared to the good old Moodle 1.9. The PHP version and Unicode are the most critical requirements that are not available in most free hosting services. Even if you try their script installer if it has Moodle, you end up with either a blank white page or a writing permission error that you can’t resolve. Ideally you will be ok with a PHP 5.3.2 and a MySql 5 with Unicode collation but that seems to a very difficult thing to get from a free host plan. Some providers give you a link to their cPanel demo where you can find out which PHP version they’re using. The rest don’t say anything about it and you have to register an account then login to the cPanel to find out that they don’t have what you’re looking for. You end up with many accounts that you don’t know what’s good for what. Even if they give you the possibility to select a PHP 5.4 that still doesn’t work because of the maximum execution time limit of 30 seconds or because of the lack of some critical PHP extensions. I’m not going to write any detailed information about that because I already wasted a lot of time on that. After trying out about ten different free hosting services I came across Freehostia (www.freehostia.com/) which offers limited disk storage of 250 MB but with a customizable PHP ini and a selection of a higher version of PHP. Their script installer is able to fix the problem of the Moodle data directory which needs to be outside the web root with some hack in the Moodle config.php and eventually install a working Moodle version 2.1 on your web site. But does that solve the problem? No, because after installing Moodle you’re left with about 130 MB which is not enough to host a decent Moodle course with the required course files and users’ uploads. Also changing the theme doesn’t take effect at all. The end result? I gave up looking around for any freer hosting but still have some hopes in hosting here. Can anyone share their experience in installing Moodle 2.+ on the hosting service that this forum offers?

Has anyone used Moodle in their classrooms? Is so how do you like it?

To save your time I'll assume that my readers know what Moodle is otherwise this post will not be relevant to them. For info. about Moodle please visit the official website The Problem: Moodle has it's own reports module where you can use a well organized interface for pulling out different reports about the activities of the users. For me as a course tutor, I need to have a quick check on the assignments submitted by my students in a certain course, certain course topic. The current reports module in Moodle is not straight forward with that regard. It pulls more data than I need which kind of doesn't highlight the parts that I'm interested in. I also hate to login every time I need to check the assignments submission. Moodle usually is a bit slow script. The Solution: It would be more practical to write a code that queries the Moodle data base and displays only what I need. A wizard interface would be ideal in my situation. Just to be specific, I'm using: Moodle version: 1.9 PHP version 5.2.17 MySQL version 5.5.29-log Application Outline: 1- A code to connect to the database : db-config.php, that will be included wheneverf we need to query the database 2- The index.php includes the db-config.php and: connects to the Moodle DB query table mdl_course to select the id and fullname fields to populate a drop-down list for the user to choose. posts the user input to sections.php 3- The sections.php will: connect to the Moodle DB query table mdl_course_sections and select the sections field that match the previously selected course id. populate a drop-down list for the user to choose posts the user input to report.php 4- Finally the report.php will: connect to the Moodle DB query mdl_assignment, mdl_assignment_submissions and mdl_user using RIGHT JOIN on the id field select only the submitted assignments using WHERE ( --- OR ----) AND ------ based on the user input, ie the course and section you selected in the previous steps in the wizard. use a while loop to display the record set in a table The Code: I tried to post the code using the BBcode but it doesn't show in the preview, so I'll try to attach it. Your feedbak is most welcome Thank you db-config.phpindex.phpsections.phpreport.php