Solution Grove - Elgg/Moodle Integration with MNET

Elgg/Moodle Integration with MNET [docs.moodle.org]

We recently connected ELGG and Moodle using the Moodle Network feature. This provides an API to allow single-sign-on between multilple servers. This can include multiple Moodle server, or other servers that support the MNET API.

For this project we needed ELGG to be the primary authority so users would sign into ELGG first, and be able to access Moodle by clicking a link that would provide the proper information to Moodle to log them into Moodle.

To the end user the integration is seamless. They click a link and the Moodle site can appear as integrated into the ELGG site. This requires some fiddling with the HTML and CSS to get Moodle and ELGG themes to be consistent. I address this in another post.

To make this work we took the MNET reference implementation in PHP and modified it to run with ELGG, providing an administrative interface to configure the integration between ELGG and Moodle.

Future work will include automatic creation of users within Moodle as soon as they are created in ELGG. Currently MNET creates the users in Moodle on demand when the user first accesses Moodle. This future work will allow administrators to manage users in Moodle, adding them to courses, etc, without requiring them to access the MNET link to Moodle.