Package: moodle
Version: 1.4.4.dfsg.1-3
Severity: normal
The working of Moodle's wwwroot configuration variable is causing us
problems. I may be missing something, but even if I am, the default way
of doing things seems unnecessarily awkward.
The apparent intention is for wwroot to be set to a full base URL:
$CFG->wwwroot = 'http://oursite.com/path/to/moodle/';
This base URL is then used for both internal links, i.e. from one
location in the Moodle-managed site to another, and in emails and other
other external references--e.g. "click on this link to see your new
message."
However, having full URLs in internal links breaks two usage models that
we need in different situations:
i. The host may be known under different names or IP addresses to
different clients. That's a hard problem when it comes to emails and
other external references, but at least it shouldn't break the internal
links.
ii. In some cases it may be desirable to use https instead of http.
With internal links specifying the protocol as well as the hostname,
https access becomes impossible without either falling back to http, or
forcing https use for everyone. In reality it may be just the admin
who needs to use https, and the certificate may be self-signed. In
that case it wouldn't be reasonable at all to force all users into
https.
These problems can be worked around by setting wwwroot to an absolute
path instead of a full URL, e.g:
$CFG->wwwroot = '/path/to/moodle/';
This works fine, except that the external references are now merely
paths, not complete URLs! So people get emails saying "click on this
link: /path/to/moodle/" which of course doesn't work.
A solution I hope could be relatively painless would be to split wwwroot
into the http://oursite.com/ and /path/to/moodle/ parts internally on
startup, keeping only the latter part in wwwroot but prepending the
first part in all cases that generate external references. I'm assuming
those are less common than the internal-reference cases in the code.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (50, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.11
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages moodle depends on:
ii apache2-mpm-prefork [httpd] 2.0.54-5 traditional model for Apache2
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.4.50 Debian configuration management sy
ii mimetex 1.50-1 LaTeX math expressions to anti-ali
ii php4 4:4.3.10-16 server-side, HTML-embedded scripti
ii php4-gd 4:4.3.10-16 GD module for php4
ii php4-mysql 4:4.3.10-16 MySQL module for php4
ii php4-pgsql 3:4.3.10-4 PostgreSQL module for php4
ii wget 1.9.1-12 retrieves files from the web
ii wwwconfig-common 0.0.43 Debian web auto configuration
-- debconf information excluded
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