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Top 10 Admin Tasks Moodle Administrators: That You Must Know For
Top 10 Admin Tasks Moodle Administrators: That You Must Know For
Top 10 Admin Tasks Moodle Administrators: That You Must Know For
Moodle Administrators
These are the top 10 tasks that a Moodle administrator should know how to use.
If you are new to Moodle and need to know how to manage the Moodle learning
management system, these top 10 must know tasks will help you get ahead.
Knowing how to create users, categories and courses is a requirement, but there are some
hidden tasks that you really should know about as I guarantee you will need them at some
point in your Moodle administration journey.
1. Clear Cache
2. Run CRON manually
3. Set tasks
4. Turn on debugging (in Moodle and manually)
5. Read log files
6. Edit the config file
7. Run automated backups
8. Check performance overview
9. Check security report
10. Use Ad-hoc Database Queries
For more information on Moodle administration or if you need help with your Moodle server or content development visit
www.ricoshae.com.au or email chris@ricoshae.com.au.
CRON is a command line function that calls certain tasks in Moodle to make database
changes, move files around, clean up data and many other time based jobs.
https://yourserver/admin/cron.php
By default, you cannot run CRON this way. To change the settings to allow you to run CRON
manually.
For more information on Moodle administration or if you need help with your Moodle server or content development visit
www.ricoshae.com.au or email chris@ricoshae.com.au.
Remove the tick beside CRON execution via command line only.
Set a CRON password for remote access
Run CRON by using the URL below with your Moodle url and your password that you
created.
http://site.example.com/admin/cron.php?password=opensesame
When you run CRON, you may need to run it more than once to complete all the tasks.
3. Set Tasks
When you run CRON it runs a collection of tasks.
You can see what these tasks are by going to the Scheduled tasks list.
By turning on Allow 'Run now' for scheduled tasks you can individually run a scheduled
task rather than re-running all the tasks using CRON.
Alternatively, you can set new tasks schedules if required.
This would only be necessary if you are using plugins that access external services.
For more information on Moodle administration or if you need help with your Moodle server or content development visit
www.ricoshae.com.au or email chris@ricoshae.com.au.
On your staging server, turning on debugging helps you check new plugin installs, debug
issues with your theme or other custom work that you have implemented.
Most general log information is available here to find out who did what and when.
Note: This is not the server error logs, they are stored in a different area.
For more information on Moodle administration or if you need help with your Moodle server or content development visit
www.ricoshae.com.au or email chris@ricoshae.com.au.
The config.php is located at the top level of your Moodle folder structure.
Depending on your platform Windows/Linux etc, that you are using changes how you access
and edit the file. Find out NOW how to access and edit the config.php file so you are ready
when the time comes to make changes to this file.
Site administration > Courses > Backups > Automated backup setup
Look through the settings, check that you have enough space to run the backups then run
them at least once a week and keep at least 2 copies of each course. You’re welcome….
For more information on Moodle administration or if you need help with your Moodle server or content development visit
www.ricoshae.com.au or email chris@ricoshae.com.au.
The plugin allows you to run SQL queries on your database to check or report on data.
You may not need this straight away, but have it ready when the time comes.
Example SQL can be found here: https://docs.moodle.org/22/en/ad-hoc_contributed_reports
For more information on Moodle administration or if you need help with your Moodle server or content development visit
www.ricoshae.com.au or email chris@ricoshae.com.au.