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Looks like MIT Academic Calendar.ics in the phpical autoinstaller runs 2003-2007.

Possibly we should make it fetch the latest ICS from the registrar's locker.

The sql.mit.edu servers currently have old_passwords=1 set in the mysqld configuration for compatibility with MySQL 3.x and 4.x clients. The ​MySQL native driver in PHP 5.3 only knows how to deal with ​new-style passwords; this will probably bite us hard when we move to PHP 5.3 as part of upgrading to Fedora 13.

We'll need to either figure out if we can do the backward-compatible but insecure hack of making PHP clients able to use old-style passwords (disable the native driver? patch it?), or if we can drop support for MySQL clients that don't support new-style passwords, i.e., 4.0.x and below.

Moodle is a highly popular open-source CMS for classes/the educational market. I've heard regular mumblings that MIT's considering a global install for replacing Stellar, although I don't know how likely that is. In the meantime, it has the potential to be highly useful for SIPB's IAP classes, ESP classes, etc. etc.

I tried installing Moodle 1.9.9+ weekly (as of today). Issues I noticed:

• The README indicates it wants a cronjob to run every five minutes. I guess we could do that but there are a couple of issues with programatically adding cronjobs. I wonder if we can instead avoid it, since it goes against the scripts "if nobody's using your site, it costs no resources other than a couple megabytes of disk space" ethos. MediaWiki?, for instance, has a "job queue" for cleanup stuff like this.
• Moodle recommends the GD extension (and can take advantage of mysqli, mbstring, curl, and xmlrpc if present). Adding an empty php.ini file makes the installer blow up, though. It works if I copy /etc/php.ini and add extension=gd.so, although that sucks. Let's fix ticket #2 instead.
• It wants a directory outside the docroot, so we need the usual ~/Scripts thing that the e.g. Django installer does.
• Once you have that directory outside the docroot writable, you don't need the Moodle directory itself writable; it spits a config.php back at you. We could probably even programatically generate that file from Wizard.
• It seems not to actually let you use mysqli; changing it back to mysql works. I didn't actually debug what was wrong.
• Once you get past the "installer", there are still a few steps like "accepting" the GPL and several screenfuls of creating tables that it wants you to do at first login that we should definitely do automatically.
• Creating tables prints "SHOW TABLES" like a hundred times. What is up with that.
• The new password requirement is unnecessarily onerous ("The password must have at least 8 characters, at least 1 digit(s), at least 1 lower case letter(s), at least 1 upper case letter(s), at least 1 non-alphanumeric character(s)") for a webapp. I would be tempted to bypass it for the initial user, which we probably can if we're automating that setup step, or get cert auth working as soon as we can.

Other than those minor points, it seems to work out of the box, so an autoinstaller should be simple.