If you are the administrator for your Moodle site, there are a lot of options at your fingertips. Most of the time, the default settings that come with your Moodle installation will work well. But there are a lot of options for customization and performance that can make your version of Moodle work exactly as you’d like.
The number of administration settings has increased a lot in recent versions of Moodle and it can take a while to understand it all. We can only provide a brief mention of each setting in this book; however, the “Moodle Docs for this page” links at the bottom of each page in Moodle provide access to further information.
This chapter is organized into sections that are the same as the links in the Site Administration block, which you’ll find on your Moodle front page when you log in as an administrator. We’ll finish with a section on Moodle support, just in case!
A good way to learn about Moodle administration is to download and install a Moodle package on your own computer. Create some test user accounts and assign them the roles of student and teacher. Try logging in as a student or a teacher in a different browser from the one displaying you logged in as an administrator. You can change an administration setting, then see how it affects students or teachers by refreshing the page (or logging out, then logging in again for role changes).
In the middle of the notifications page is the “Moodle Registration” button for registering your Moodle site with Moodle.org. Despite the statement “Please register your site to remove this button,” the button doesn’t go away when you register! It remains in order to enable you to update your registration—simply click the button again at any time. Updating your registration periodically helps improve the accuracy of the global Moodle statistics (http://moodle.org/stats/).
Below the Moodle Registration button is your Moodle version number. If you add a bug report to the Moodle tracker (http://tracker.moodle.org/), you should state your Moodle version number.
The notifications page may also include a warning that your site might not be secure and a statement if your cron has not run within the past 24 hours. The cron is a script that is run regularly and checks whether certain tasks need performing, such as sending email copies of forum posts.