Direct links to Moodle in Moodle system e-mails

Hello,

as with probably most Joomdle users I use Joomla as main site an Moodle as integrated part with reduced theme to fit the iframe display. I noticed that Moodle system e-mail messages i.e. for course news include multiple direct links to Moodle showing the Moodle page alone and not in Joomla's iframe. Is there any solution for this or a best practice?

Thanks,
Andreas

Yes that would be correct as you have configured Moodle to notify and Moodle does not know about Joomla. You could do a number of things:
- Have Joomla send out
- Modify the notification message to include the Joomla link
- Use an RSS feed and send out from there

- Have Joomla send out

Sounds very good! Where can this be configured?

- Modify the notification message to include the Joomla link

Could you give an example how such a modified link should look like? I ask since I suppose it includes variables to have dynamically set i.e. course link or teacher link.

Easy answer but one you may not like .... currently there is no configuration option for this. As Joomdle does not provide this functionality at this point.

Joomla does however have many 3rd party components which could achieve this
- Using an 'internal' / system feed which in tern sends out.
- Using one of the newsletter managers to prepare regular send outs with links. This would be scheduled events rather than automated alerts.
- Have the Moodle news posted to a forum which is pushed to Kunena forum which in terns sends out to subscribers (or other feed approaches)
- Create your course news in Joomla (article, newsletter system, forum, etc.). Course news is typically manually created so technically it could be created anywhere ie Joomla. Personally, Joomla is a far better tool to manage such content using Moodle to manage the course. After all you have chosen Joomla as the front door, so you might as well leverage its capabilities.

Modifying the links - I have not done this however it should be a pretty easy task.
- send out your course news
- read the links
- navigate to the news via Joomla / Joomdle
- compare the links
- edit the Moodle code that creates the links replace the beginning part of the url with the appropriate Joomla path

While I do not know your specific business needs or processes, personally I would leverage Joomla for such content.

Another relatively simple option would be to create a template override of the course news. The override would prepare a rss or similar display that can be read, packaged and sent out as you choose using many Joomla extensions.

In my case the indivdual teachers write individual news on there own courses through Moodle interface without using Joomla (this is for students). So the easiest way to go is modifying the Moodle links in Moodle. Could you point me to the file that needs to be edited?

I am not sure which module in Moodle is responsible for this. You can post that question in the Moodle forum or just trace back.

Shame your teachers could not simply log into the Joomla frontend and type up the news. It is a far better technical solution giving your teachers much better business options. My two cents anyway .....

I am open for improvements. I can't see how sending through joomla is much better in this case and which business options you mean? Goal is to inform students of a specific course about news in the course. (Newsletter is sent out independent from the course news)

Without knowing your business needs, I would hazard a guess that you have courses which have a finite duration with different students which may or may not be enrolled in other courses.

For me, I like to maintain communication with course students beyond the duration of the course for a few reasons such as pre-sales / announcements of related and/or upcoming courses, support / feedback channels, surveys etc.

In other words I treat course news as just another newsletter but specific to a particular course. Therefore, the features, rules, managing, tracking, etc. capabilities you would find in a newsletter system are equally important for course news. Even for course news, I would want to be able to track email opens, click through, bounces, etc. to gain insight over the usefulness of the course news, knowing the lead time for students to open news, and knowing what type of content students are clicking through.

Anyway, it was just a thought ....

Thanks for explaining, now I understand what you mean.

That is really interesting and I haven't thought about it yet. At the moment this seems too advanced in my case, but I will try to implement this in a later stage since it enables good tracking and sales possibilities as you mentioned.