Wordpress integration within Canvas

[Jérémie Sicsic]

Hi,

I wanted to know if any of you guys did try to plug Wordpress LTI app as an external tool within Canvas ?

If yes :

• how well did you succeed ?
  
• how does it work ? Is it easy for students to login directly to your wordpress multisite account ?

Thanks you very much for your feadbacks !

[Colin Murtaugh]

Hi Jérémie --

We haven't done this yet, but are interested -- let me know if you try it out!  (If I get some time to experiment with it, I'll post here too.)

Thanks-

Colin

[Jérémie Sicsic]

Hi Colin,

No time to do this neither.
I'll let you know if I try, probably in september !

--
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Canvas LMS Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/canvas-lms-users/iJFNRaNHDUo/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to canvas-lms-use...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Jared Stein]

I've spent a fair amount of time getting this working and will share my notes with the disclaimer that I haven't looked at this plug-in since April.

The first thing to note is that there is a relatively new version (4/2013) that doesn't seem to work at all with Canvas (the LTI was originally made specifically to work with Moodle).

So, I'll be talking about the 02-11-2013 version. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/learningapps/files/Files/Basic%20LTI%20Integrations/Wordpress/ to access current and past versions.

The goal of the LTI4WordPress tool is to make it easy for members of a course to authenticate into and author in a course-related WordPress site. It does require that you're running your own WP MU instance, Network-enabled.

Short version: The big drawback with the WP LTI plugin is how it creates WordPress site paths--it's actually pretty terrible. There are a couple other bugs that are tolerable. Everything else is pretty straight-forward and generally OK.

Long Version:

You must first set up your WordPress install to fully support MultiUser, which takes a few steps that I won't describe here.

Then, don't forget to activate the plugin from the Network settings. (Funny, I remember having to do that, but now I don't actually see the plugin! I just see the Settings. Might be a bug right there.)

The documentation suggests otherwise, but I was only able to get this LTI tool working properly with a subfolder-based WP set-up. A subdomain-based setup wouldn't cooperate, but I admit I didn't dig in deeply.

Installing the plugin is straight-forward, as are the LTI Settings. You can create any number of setups for a number of different LTI consumers (you probably just need one, though you might do one per Canvas Sub-Account):

• key This is also actually used as a prefix for the WP subfolder path, strangely enough.
  
• secret whatever you want
  
• custom username parameter I presumed this would affect username creation in WP, but it doesn't. It may actually instigate a blog naming bug with Canvas implementation, but I haven't replicated it yet.

Inside Canvas, the LTI tool is no problem. Settings > Apps > View Installed Apps > Add New App

There is no configuration URL or XML to provide; just choose manual setup. You do need to set it to anything but Anonymous. Either URL or Domain matching works fine. There are a couple of possible parameters, but they're not important afaik.

Then you add the External tool to a Module (or Assignment). 

The first user to try to access the tool within the Canvas Course will create the WordPress site for the entire class, apparently. Doesn't matter what their role is.

Strangely, the tool creates a different WP site for every external tool link that you create within the course.

My main hang-up is that the LTI plugin creates a WP site with a rotten subfolder name. In Moodle it looks like it uses the course's courseID; in Canvas it uses some hashed value that the LMS sends over (see below). More to discover there, for sure.

It users the Canvas Course shortname for the WP site name, so that's cool. 

The LTI tool also creates users on the WordPress site whenever they themself click the link. If their username doesn't exist already, it creates one for them; if it does exist, it's supposed to authenticate them through Canvas.

Ivy at Keene State reminded me that it created WP usernames based on a hash, too, but I must have fixed that on my install -- I think I just tweaked a line of PHP, but now I can't remember where that was -- sorry!

It tries to match roles, but I found that with Canvas it wants to make students subscribers(!), not contributors by default (teachers are made editors). I need to figure out what Canvas provides to the LTI tool for a role name; I suspect Moodle is providing non-LTI-standard names, and the plugin just happens to match off of the instructor name.

When the LTI tool creates a user, it doesn't create a password to match. Probably because Canvas won't share that (which is right). Users can go directly to the blog and be emailed their password, provided an email was sent over through LTI. This allows them to login outside of Canvas, but that's not worth much when the blog URL is something like

http://optop.us/cnvs-5b396a09bfb965a5e95dff457c7a75de46ddfa16-3de2a3d26b3ad93e139709122ad748a6e9bd1866/

There's a pretty serious bug here, though, but it may be one that I myself introduced because I tweaked usernames: the LTI plugin wants to try to recreate users each time they re-authenticate, and since WP users are created across sites that causes some big headaches with multiple sites.

Hope that helps!

[Josh Blumberg]

I am just starting a project that will involve Wordpress and Canvas.

A college level course with many multiple sections.  Each section will use Wordpress to publish student work.  Sections will then compare and contrast the published work across sections.

The reason to utilize Wordpress is to have a quality publishing engine that highlights the student's work.  The college is already bought into Wordpress so it should be easier as a choice.

I am struggling to see how to utilize this LTI tool.  If as Jared says it creates a new Wordpress site with a crazy url, it will be hard to publicize.  I was hoping to avoid students needing to login twice, but this seems like more of a headache than it is worth currently.  I am now thinking I may be better off with a single Wordpress site and trying to avoid managing users by using WP User FrontEnd( http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-frontend/).  I haven't tried the plugin yet but I am hoping it will allow us to avoid needing to manage the student users on the Wordpress site.  Faculty would be the admins and would approve posts submitted through a form by the students.  This also would minimize the need to train the students.

Do you think I should be looking at the LTI tool some more?

Any thoughts?

Josh

[Jared Stein]

Hi Josh, here's my 2c:

I love WP. I love the idea of the WP LTI tool, but there's too much in there that's frustrating. I dunno, maybe it works brilliant with Moodle. 

So, if I were working on a WP project I would look at other options first, tackling the largest challenge, user accounts and authentication.

For example, at UVU we used a combination of LDAP and CAS for user account management and SSO. Our WP instance used an LDAP plugin to facilitate user account synchronization (as I recall that plugin did not facilitate LDAP authentication, just account mapping to WP).

There's also a SAML 2 WP plugin that I'm not familiar with, but should facilitate true SSO if that's a protocol your institution is using.

If those were not possibilities, I would try to find a clever CS student who is into PHP to modify the LTI plugin :)

--
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Canvas LMS Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/canvas-lms-users/iJFNRaNHDUo/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to canvas-lms-use...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--

Jared Stein | Director of Knowledge Resources

ja...@instructure.com

o: 801.869.5064 | c: 801.228.8121

instructure.com

[Josh Blumberg]

Jared,

Thanks a bunch.  I'll  try to keep this project simple (K.I.S.S.)... We use SAML here for SSO, so we may look at that at some point.

[Otto Esselink]

Any luck here with integration of Canvas into WordPress? ... i am looking for a sollution

to integrate Canvas into BuddyPress