Community hubs

Template:Moodle 2.0A community hub is a directory of courses for public use or for private communities.

The diagram above shows the basic idea. The systems in this diagram are:

Ordinary Moodle site

A typical Moodle site with teachers who want to download course templates and/or users who want to connect (enrol) with external communities

Publishing site

A Moodle site that wants to make some of its courses available for download

Community site

A Moodle site that provides courses that are enrollable

Moodle Hub Server

A new open source web application for publishing a list of registered courses that are downloadable or enrollable. The default hub will be installed at hub.moodle.org, but there can be many others.

Downloadable courses

• (A) Sites that want to publish certain courses and make them downloadable can register them with one or more Hub Servers.
• (B) The Hub will check the data and make sure the course zip is downloadable, caching a copy locally. The Hub may also have a security process to check the download for trojan horses, bad content, etc (automatic and/or manual).
• (C) The download process may trigger the backup process on the original server if it hasn't been done already.
• (D) Later, Moodle users (who have permissions to do so) can connect to a Hub (via the Repository file picker) to search for downloadable courses and choose one (receiving a download URL).
• (E) The repository API downloads the file and makes it available to the Moodle user so they can now continue to restore it normally.

Enrollable courses

• (1) Sites that want to publish certain courses for the public to enrol in can register them with one or more CDS (including the main one at moodle.org)
• (2) Later, any Moodle user can connect to a CDS (via Community block in their site) to search and find courses they want to join
• (3) They click on a link to be sent to the other site so that they can enrol there (with or without MNet).

See also

• Hub administration
• [Community Hub Specification]