WordPress to Moodle (and Vice Versa) with RSS

@kshuntley#etp18 @kshuntley
Kenneth Scott Huntley
TAFE NSW
EdtechPosium 2018

• Does Moodle need an introduction?
• Open Source LMS (Learning
Management System)
• Moodle HQ is in Australia!
• When I was a teacher at TAFE, I
learned to build courses and then
manage our section’s Moodle.
• Worked as a consultant training
people to use Moodle.
• I have “Moodle friends” around the
world.
@kshuntley@kshuntley#etp18 @kshuntley

• Does WordPress need an introduction?
• About 1/3 of the web is run on
WordPress.
• When I was a teacher at TAFE, I was
teaching WordPress (using Moodle!)
• The first conference I spoke at was a
WordPress conference!
• WordCamp Sydney 2014
• And three days later I went to my first
Moodle Conference – MootNZ14
• And I literally just spoke at WordCamp
Brisbane three days ago.
• I have love for both these pieces of
software and both these communities!

• There’s a teacher at the Institute of Hypothetical - Dr E. Xample.
• Let’s say she’s a frequent blogger.
• Let’s say our professor wants to bring her blogging/publications back into the classroom for
discussion.
• WordPress is a brilliant platform for blogging.
• Well known, well established, well supported.
• How do we feed this content back into a Moodle course?

• Alternatively: Rich Site Summary
• RSS is…
• …a way to publish an “article” on a website to a web feed.
• With an aggregator, you can then read that feed.
• …totally dead. No one is using it any more. Almost.
• Twitter no longer offers RSS.
• Facebook no longer offers RSS.
• Google discontinued its aggregator.

• So who is using RSS?
• Podcasts are actually delivered with RSS feeds.
• Each episode is actually an article with an attached mp3 or mp4 file.
• The mp3 is downloaded to your device.
• The article becomes the cover art and the show notes.
• This is interesting, but completely tangential.

• So who is using RSS?
• Some Moodle Activities generate RSS feeds.
• Blogs, Database, Glossary, Forums can all generate RSS feeds.
• https://docs.moodle.org/35/en/RSS_feeds
• https://docs.moodle.org/35/en/Using_Blogs

• So who else is using RSS?
• WordPress generates RSS feeds
• Your entire blog has a feed (i.e. all the articles)
• Authors can have feeds
• Comments have feeds
• Specific Categories and Tags can have feeds
• https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds

• Let’s say Dr. E. Xample blogs on her WordPress site.
• Any post she tags with her class name “INFO101” will be in the RSS
feed for that tag.
• These posts she wants to import into Moodle.
• For these screen shots, I’m going to import the RSS feed from my blog for
the tag “TAFE”.

So here’s a post I
wrote last year
about TAFE

I added a number of
tags, including “TAFE”. I
also added this to the
Category of
“Commentary”.
Remember, Categories
are big topics that your
blog is about. Tags are
keywords that this article
is about.

I’ve used the tag
“TAFE” 5 times (so far)
in my blog

• Now that Dr. E. Xample is generating content on her blog, how does she
display it in Moodle?
• We’ll use the Remote RSS Feeds block.
• There’s a few other plugins for RSS that you may want to look at; RSS
Plus, Advanced RSS Feed, Moderated RSS.
• https://moodle.org/plugins/index.php?q=rss

In my Moodle
course, I turn on
editing…

…and “Add a block”.
I’m looking for
“Remote RSS feeds”.

Click on the gear to
configure the Feed.

We currently don’t have
any feeds. We need to
Add/edit feeds.
“It’s a permissions
thing!” - Check your
permissions; not every
role can add/edit a
feed!

What’s my feed URL?

• The WordPress Codex has a great page on Feeds:
https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds
• There are many feeds we can generate, but a tag feed looks
this:
http://www.example.com/tag/tagname/feed
• So, for my example, I need to replace the protocol, the
domain and the tag slug.
https://scott.technology/tag/tafe/feed

In case you don’t know the
slug, check out your tags in
WordPress…
…hover over the tag, and
“edit” should appear. Edit
your tag…

…and there’s your slug!
ProTip: Resist the urge to
edit your slug willy nilly.
It’s going to totally mess
with your SEO.

Fill in your feed URL
(and title if you want)

Now when you configure
the block there’s a feed to
choose!
ProTip: You can set up
multiple feeds to display
in multiple blocks.

• And now I have a Block in my course
displaying a link to my WordPress
articles.
• I kept it simple for this demonstration.
• There are some Moodle plugins you
can play with.
• Some pull in a little more of the story
and the featured image.

• You can register an External Blog in Moodle.
• i.e. a WordPress blog.
• So student A. Keener can register his WordPress blog, and
Moodle will copy the contents of his WordPress blog to his
Moodle blog.
• A. Keener can even do the same tag or category trick to only
copy posts tagged with the class name “INFO101”.
• So his Marvel movie reviews won’t be mixed in with his school
work, even if they’re from the same blog.

As an Admin, check the
Blog settings.

As a course participant, In
my preferences, I can
“register an external blog”

Again, get the feed from your
WordPress. And again, you can
use a feed specific to tags,
categories or authors.

You could use Moodle to filter
for feed items with a specific
tag, but I prefer to use
WordPress to do the filtering.
You can automatically add a
tag inside Moodle to this post
that originated externally. That
could be useful!

• Our teacher Dr. E. Xample is
going to get her students to blog
about the course.
• Students can do this in Moodle:
• from their profile.
• from the Blog Menu block.
• Students can do this externally
(as A. Keener does in WordPress).

• You can also tap into the RSS feed…
• …from a Tumblr blog
• Just add “/rss” to the end of a Tumblr
url
• …from a Blogger blog
• https://support.google.com/blogger/
answer/97933?hl=en for instructions
on how

Let’s do a little blogging in
Moodle. I’m going to “Add an
entry about this course.”

You can attach a file
to a blog post in
Moodle.
You can also tag blog
posts.

It looks a little too much
like a forum for my tastes.
But it works for getting
students to do reflective
blogging.
But let’s take this blog post
and feed it back to
WordPress.

• Even though I can see everyone’s
entries, the RSS feed link is just
my posts.
• I can now use this RSS link to
syndicate my content back to
WordPress.

There are many WordPress
plugins for RSS. A search for
RSS turns up 151 pages of
results.

I’ve been using
FeedWordPress to syndicate
content and I’m fairly happy
with it.
ProTip: Look for plugins that
update often and are used by
many people.

After you install
FeedWordPress, click on
Syndicated Sites in the menu
(under Syndication).
Add your RSS link that you
copied from Moodle to the
New source and hit Add.

One setting I like to turn on is hold the
post for review in Pending so I can
tweak it for my blog.
But I could have published right away!

Another setting I like is the ability to
assign a category to posts from this feed.
I use this for syndicated blog posts I
wrote for the blog for the last company I
worked with.
You can also
automatically tag your
syndicated posts.

One thing to watch out for is
unmatched authors; it will try
to match authors to users of
the WordPress blog.

I just assigned all articles
on this feed to my
WordPress user.

Our test Moodle blog post
is now showing up in my
WordPress posts (as
Pending).
The time is when I
posted it on
Moodle, 24
minutes ago.

It looks like it’s come across
almost perfect.
I have a few issues with the
post, but I’ll live.

Even my Moodle tag has
come across.
A beautiful thing!
But… no file attachment.
It’s good. But not
perfect.

At this point you might be
wondering… “can I post
the feed of another
WordPress blog?”
Not only can you syndicate content from
another blog (or blogs), as we’ve seen,
you can build a feed for a
specific tag, category or author
(or any combination of these).

With my former company,
when syndicating blog posts
from their blog to my site,
adding to the “Syndicated”
category.
This text widget would only
show in the sidebar for this
category, explaining the content
was syndicated, with a link to
the company blog.
Those settings are under
“Visibility” when you add a
text widget to your site.

Let’s test it as a student.
Will student posts come
across though?
I added a student to my
course and then logged
in as that student.

I wrote a post as Archie

I made sure I associated
the post with the
Course which RSS I have
syndicated to my
WordPress site.

And Archie’s post
appears in my WordPress

• Moodle and WordPress can be used together!
• Dr. E. Xample and A. Keener are able to blog in either platform and pass
their content back and forth.
• RSS might be dying for the casual user but there’s a lot of power there.
• WordPress has excellent feed generating options - put them to work!
• Moodle can generate RSS feeds from a number of Activities - maybe you
can do something fun with the Glossary or Database activity.
• Find a good syndication plugin for WordPress. I like FeedWordPress but
see what works for you.
• Have fun exploring!

Thank You!
Questions?
Continue the conversation:
www.scott.technology
scott@kshuntley.com
kenneth.huntley3@tafensw.edu.au@kshuntley
www.linkedin.com/in/kshuntley/
#etp18

WordPress to Moodle (and Vice Versa) with RSS

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to WordPress to Moodle (and Vice Versa) with RSS

Similar to WordPress to Moodle (and Vice Versa) with RSS (20)

More from Kenneth Scott Huntley

More from Kenneth Scott Huntley (19)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

WordPress to Moodle (and Vice Versa) with RSS