Administration

As soon as your course is installed and initialized, you may call the administration interface through the URL

http://your.webserver.address/~yourid/MyCourse/admin/

where  MyCourse  denotes the name you have give to the course. As lecturer (course admin, course author) you have access to the administration interface through your admin password, which you have already specified in the file inc/general_vars.inc.php. This uid/password combination may be changed at any time without the necessity to repeat the installation.

Outside users access the course through the URL

http://your.webserver.address/~yourid/MyCourse

and may visit those course units, which need no individual login. For your students you have to specify userids and passwords which can be done via the administration interface. There is an application request form available for the students through the login menu. When completed the information is sent to the course administrator's e-mail address. As course administrator you may then quickly sign up the student by clicking at the URL provided in that e-mail.

Students may then login individually and thus have access to all course material prepared by you.

Your first step should be to create a standard user account for yourself. This will allow you to check out the course as a standard user.

In the administration interface you may

• Administrate users, groups and folders of the Filedepot (add, update, remove users and groups, send mail, check access statistics etc.).
• Insert or update Exercises.
• Inspect and remove user contributed notes, forum contributions etc.
• Combine several html-files of your course's contents part for printing of lecture notes.
• Get information on how to access the SQL data base.

All user and group data, exercises, information on files and folders and other details are put into an MySQL data base. Direct access to this data base is usually not necessary, but sometimes useful. We suggest to use the package mysqladmin for that purpose. More information may be found in the corresponding link in the admin area.

The access to the forum and to the userspace/Filedepot has course administrator rights, when called from the admin area. You may then delete topical threads in the discussion forum and adjust (delete, move, copy) all files and folders in the userspace/Filedepot.

All variables, which you have set, added, removed or modified in the file inc/general_vars.inc.php may be changed at any time. There are only two sensitive entries, where such a change has to accompanied by secondary actions:

(a) Changes to the course owner name and password in the SQL data base should be followed by such changes in the data base. Consult the MySQL information pages or your SysAdmin, if this becomes necessary.

(b) Changes that affect the images files (like menu-buttons, titles images etc.) that have been generated during the initial setup process. Such a change has to be followed by calling again the installation script install.html from your the web browser.