Connecting Sakai to Wordpress

LMS platforms have fairly long been consolidated at universities as on-line learning support tools. For a long time they were exposed to disappear because of the low level of interoperability to third-party services they offered. Finally, as a result of that need together with the mobility nature of teachers and students between institutions (and consequently on its LMS), interoperability mechanisms were implemented to bring the required tools to their users.

Tool interoperability allows to connect remote tools inside LMS environment, keeping them contextualized by the courses or activities from they are called. There were some attempts like IMS-TI (IMS Tool Interoperability) or Campus Project, but it was not until the emergence of IMS LTI  1.0 (IMS Learning Tool Interoperability) that TI technology became more popular.
 
Nowadays, you can find several examples of LMS that implement IMS LTI  like Angel, Moodle, BlackBoard, D2L, etc. Many of these LMS, in addition to consuming LTI tools are also able to provide their own tools to the rest of LMS through IMS LTI.  We can find multiple scenarios like a teacher using Sakai with Moolde tools and viceversa; Moodle consuming a tool from a payment service like Piazza, etc.

Now, I will guide you about how integrate Wordpress into Sakai using LTI. Wordpress is an open blog platform that can be installed or used as a hosted service. Blog functions are not related to pure pedagogical uses, but the need of keeping students involved in the course building process, made these tools to take active part on LMS's live.

Although many LMS already have their own blog tool, they don't provide as features as a dedicated blog products like Wordpress offers. Thanks to LTI and the Wordpress connector developed by  +Chuck Severance and subsequently improved by people of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), we can enjoy a Wordpress space for each Sakai site.

The following guide will take you through the necessary steps to install and connect a Wordpress in your institution's Sakai.

Previous requirements

Before installing Wordpress you need:

• Apache Web Server 2.2 or above
• PHP 5.2.4 or above.
• MySQL 5.0 or above.

Download Wordpress from its web page: http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

Also, you must download the LTI Wordpress plugin:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/learningapps/files/Files/Basic%20LTI%20Integrations/Wordpress/wordpressLTIPlugin.zip/download

Install and configure Wordpress

You must follow the "Famous 5-Minute Install" instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress to install and configure Wordpress.

After that, you should activate the Wordpress multisite feature. Open the wp-config.php and set up the variable WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE to true, just before the stop editing mark.

You should have something like that:

...


/* Multisite */

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true); 

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
... 

If you did it well, you will find a new item called "Network setup", on the "Tools" section on the left-hand navigation menu.

If you go to this section, you will see the available options to setup your Wordpress as multisite (directories or domains). Let's use directories mode.


If you press on "Install" button, you will see the configuration files paths you should update to enable this feature. Remember to grant the privileges again to apache user on these files.

Maybe, you should set up the main Apache configuration file to allow overriding site behaviours through .htaccess files.

  
    #
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
    # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
    #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    #
    AllowOverride All

Once finished, you will see a new item "Network settings".

If it didn't work for you, you should consider taking a look at the following instructions: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

Install lti plugin

Unzip the content of the LTI plugin package into "plugins" directory on Wordpress. Remember to grant privileges on these files. Then, on the "Network Admin Dashboard" -> "Settings", you will find a new section called "LTI consumer keys".

You should specify here a new key to be used on Sakai Basic LTI consumer tool.  For instance, you can use:

• Consumer key: my-sakai.consumer.key
• Secret: my-sakai-secret

Check the 'active' option, before saving.

Connect Sakai to wordpress

If you are 'maintain' or 'Instructor' of a Sakai site, you are able to set up a tool instance on that site that connects to an external tool. You can do it going to "Site Info"-> "Edit Tools" and checking "External Tool". Now, press "Continue" and  write a name for that tool.Press "Continue"  and "Save" on the confirmation screen. 

Now, you will see a new page on your site. Go there and press the edit icon on the top-right corner  to set up the tool.

Provide the parameters:

• Remote Tool Url: Your Wordpress url  (http://my-wordpres.mydomain.com/)
• Remote Tool Key: my-sakai.consumer.key
• Remote Tool Secret:  my-sakai-secret

o

Also, check the options:

• Send Names to the External Tool
• Open in a new window (Optional)

Now, you can see a new Wordpress site for that Sakai site, and its members can publish posts on it.

If you want to show Wordpress site on the same frame of the tool, you should uncheck the "Open in a new window" option  on Sakai LTI tool, and install the "Allow From X-Frame-Options" plugin on Wordpress. You can get it at http://blog.dearbornschools.org/webmaster/files/2012/10/wp_allow-from-x-frame-options.zip

Copy the content of that zip on the "plugins" directory of your Wordpress and activate it for all Sites going to "Network Admin" Dashboard -> "Plugins" (left menu) -> "Installed plugins" , and press "Networt activate" link option of that plugin.

Recommendations

I really recommend you to take a look at the following sites to understand better all the process:

IMS LTI: http://www.imsglobal.org/toolsinteroperability2.cfm

Wordpress LTI connector: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/learningapps/index.php?title=LTI4Wordpress