[Closed] User sync

I Think it is important to have some kind of way to sync joomla and moodle user information.
personally my users only have access to one profile page which is moodle's page. if they change their email or password it doesn't get updated in joomla's database, which may result in a situation users lock themselves out of moodle, since the only way to get in is joomla.

what do you think?

Agreed.

We are looking at some of this now. Some of it will be included R0.24. Already in R0.23 you can lock the profile information in the Joomdle authentication plugin in moodle but, we do not give a way to update it with exception of through the VM profile.

We will open up the development forums soon, where individuals like you can see and contribute making the development process more effective.

you can see the bd moodle authentication, this plugin comes in moodles options and is for use an external BD to authenticate... if i'm not wrong, this plugin can realize an user sync between BDs..

Some things:
- Joomdle users cannot change password in Moodle, as they don't have any
- Profile info is centralized in Joomla. When you update Joomla profile, Moodle is updated automatically. The oppositte is not true, and that is why you can block profile editing in Moodle, as Chris suggested.

Its nice to know it behaves this way, but loosing moodle's profile is loosing one of its best features. i love the profile and the comunity feel of moodle's profile. I think user sync is still important. please consider it again...

I don't really know if I understand you here. do you want:
- Centralized profile in Moodle, insted of Joomla as it is now.
- Or not centralized profile: users can change their data in any platform and the other should auto-sync.

As Chris has said before, I think we have different views around this. We think of Moodle as a subset of Joomla, so it makes sense to make profile reside on Joomla.

The Moodle profile is not lost this way, as it can be read inside Moodle by the users as if it were a normal Moodle profile. Or am I missing something?

what i was thinking of is a simple sync button on joomla's admin interface (like jfusion has). This will give you the option to choose which profile you want to use.

personally i cant see how one can fully use moodle without using it's elaborate profile and community tools. its all intermingled inside the system. I think its much more trouble and very crippling to avoid using the moodle forums, private messaging, profile, blogs, social friending and so on. If you don't use that, all thats left is a blog with cumbersome permissions...

joomla has no profile. just username, email, and password fields. Moodle has an elaborate profile... including avatar, which is used all over moodle, location, and so on.

i personally like the fact that after you register quickly in joomla, when you go to moodle it asks you to fill in more details. The joomsocial and community builder plugins are imho scaring users off.

btw i'm using com_seminar for my booking so my users can see the amount of places left, have a waiting list, and divide the payment process into two. its really nice!

register to my site and try browsing around maybe it will make more sense then

mmmm many many thoughts to comment on - it's nice that this is getting some discussion as it what makes a better product.

Agreed. We do not want to loose the ability to have full profile information that Moodle provides. This is important for any community. Our intention is not to loose any of this at all but in fact expand upon it, make it more functional and more available to all extensions - of course today, this cannot be done with the Joomla registration database alone and even in Joomla 1.6 this will not be straight out of the box either. Thus we are looking at integrating the Jomsocial profile with Moodle, the CB user profile, the VM profile, the Anahita profile, etc. etc. Other options could be membership systems. To be honest the choices are limitless and thus we will just take one-step at a time. Of course you could argue to take the Moodle user profile and push it out to those extensions. Technically I doubt it is not much different - Antonio will probably scold me for over simplifying things

Once the first sync is done, we cannot rely on admin having to sync continuously or even have a cron job as users will expect that data to be live. Thus any admin 'interference' must be ad-hoc tasks to configure the environment, migrate, change, etc. Thus we are fortunate that Moodle works by allowing external databases (ie any of the above) to provide the profile information. But those who choose not to use any of the above can chose to not lock the Moodle user profile data and they can continue like they normally do. At this point, since we are still early days into this, I do not know if by allowing the update of the user's profile will it update external databases or whether we need to change Moodle's code. If it's possible to allow changing from both sides, this would be positive but again I do not want to make an assumption about this yet. As you can see the development work thus far is on Joomla.

Regardless, no matter which location you use to store the user details, the end result is to promote the user of any community tools such as Moodle's forums, blogs, calendar, etc. should you choose to do so. Where we see a slight different view, than yourself I presume, is that I believe Moodle users are a subset of Joomla's users and thus we cannot force all Joomla users to take a course or enter Moodle just to participate in the community. For example I could have a very large IT community (tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands if you are joomla.org) that uses VBulletin, Joomla, Wikipedia, Jomsocial and Moodle. We cannot nor should not force all those users into Moodle to participate in non course related community activities. Of course, if they all agree to spend money and take a course the site owner would be laughing all the way to the bank However, this is not realistic.

In a school environment, it maybe slightly different. The chances of "all" users having a Moodle account is higher. But does that mean I must/should force users into Moodle to join a football league or having a discussion about the football game? What if I wanted to offer online games through Puarcade, what if I am a company that makes car parts and has a network of thousands of engineers. They have a very focused community that would have subject matter experts using FAQs, online chats, forums, etc. and offer the occasional course, perhaps a video blogging site that offers some courses on using multimedia tools, the examples can go on forever.

I agree community builder is scaring ppl off already and IMO that is because it is old now and has not kept pace with the changes in the market. I know many ppl will argue with me on this but as said it is MHO.

I have not used com_seminar before as I thought it didn't integrate with Virtuemart. I will have another look - thanks for reminding me of this extension.

Finally, perhaps something worth thinking about - for those communities that wish to do everything in Moodle or like 70-80% of their "tasks" in Moodle then I would ask the question, why use Joomla? Especially with Moodle 2.0 coming down the road which will give greater CMS features I believe??

i was looking a few things, and i think that is possible to make this sync in two ways, for a school platform is very usefull the moodle profil, and is hard to loose it, the first step is sync password in the same moment that the user's first login in moodle, and it can be done by encrypting de password stored in the session object. The next steep is to make the password sync when moodle user change it by profile editing, the joomla encryption is easy to understand, then is only a webservice in the right point..

and again, just like the mod calendar, is a need for me right now, then, i can work in this require, but, again, going to need your help to understand some things in joomdle code..

of course, all this if you agree..