This page refers to Classic Poodll. For Cloud Poodll see: Getting Started with Cloud Poodll. For new Poodll installations you should just use Cloud Poodll.
1. Sign up on Poodll.com
To use most Poodll plugins you will need an account on Poodll.com. Get an account by signing up for a subscription or a free trial at https://poodll.com/try-poodll/
2. Visit the Poodll Dashboard
Visit your Poodll member dashboard at : https://member.poodll.com
When you register for a free trial or a subscription, you will receive an email with your username and password. If you do not receive the email (check your spam and promotions folders too) you can request it again by entering your email at: https://member.poodll.com/login/forgot_password.php
2. Register your site URLs
Poodll authenticates your site URLs as they appear in the Moodle site configuration file. Your registration is checked against that when Poodll runs. To register your site URL, go to https://member.poodll.com and enter your Moodle site's URL/domain (start from http/https).Poodll will not run if your site URLs are not registered, so you must complete this step.
You can enter up to 5 URLs as long as they are all for your organization. Poodll paid subscriptions plans also allow you to use a wildcard '*' in place of the www (or other subdomain) to enable all subdomains, e.g https://*.mycoolsite.com .
NB The URL needs to begin with "https" or "http".
(Free trial subscriptions do not support wildcards.)
3. Copy your API User and API Secret
Poodll uses your API user and API secret to allow your site users access to Poodll services. You will find your API user and secret on your school page at https://member.poodll.com
You will need these when you setup Poodll plugins on your Moodle site. Either copy them now or come back here and copy them after you install the plugins.from your Poodll member dashboard
4. Install the Poodll Plugins that you want.
Generally you can install the Poodll plugins in one of three ways, via Moodle.org, via Zip file, or using Git.
We suggest you start by just installing: Cloud Poodll Assignment Submission
Once you have that working correctly, then install the other ones they you are interested in.
Plugin specific installation instructions are here:
* The editor plugins will not show until you have configured the HTML editor (Atto or TinyMCE) to display them. Be sure review the documentation for each plugin for details on how to do that.
4. Set the API username and secret
Paste the API user and secret from the Poodll Dashboard into each of the Poodll plugin settings page in the Moodle site administration. The Cloud Poodll plugins and Poodll filter each require their own copy. (Older classic Poodll plugins just use the Poodll filter's API user and secret.)
When you renew or upgrade your subscription (eg from free trial to a paid one) the Poodll plugins will know about that automatically. You do not need to update any settings for them. But it may take up to 12 hours for the information to come through.
You can confirm that everything is ok after adding those by pressing the "Refresh license information" link (under the API secret in Moodle ) after saving the new settings.
5. Enable the Poodll filter (Classic Poodll only)
The Poodll players and widgets rely on the Poodll filter to work. And the older Classic Poodll assignment , quiz and editor plugins all need the Poodll filter. To use these, in most cases you will need to:
- Enable the Poodll filter
- Move it above multimedia plugins in the list of filters
You can do both of these tasks at:
Site administration -> Plugins -> Filters -> Manage filters
6. Confirm default mp4/mp3 handler
PoodLL3 takes a different approach to other media filters, in how it handles the links it is asked to process. Players can be freely configured, customized or created as templates. Any template which has “Show in players list” checked on its template page, will appear as an option to be selected from on the file extension settings page, beside each file extension.
When PoodLL 3 is installed, by default “Flowplayer First Frame” and “Audio JS Shim” are available and registered to handle .mp4 and .mp3 respectively. Confirm this by visiting the PoodLL settings File extensions settings page at:
Site administration -> Plugins ->Filters ->PoodLL ->File Extension Settings
If mp3 and mp4 handlers are not configured,
i) Check “handle mp4” and select “Flowplayer First Frame”
ii) Check “handle mp3” and select “Audio JS Shim”
(You can can use different audio and video players too, if those templates are available.)
7. Ensure your cron job is running
Moodle relies on "cron" to do processing behind the scenes. Poodll also relies on Moodle's cron job. Poodll converts recorded files into mp3 and mp4 in the cloud. It then copies them back into Moodle. When Poodll cloud notifications are enabled (this is the default) then the copy back happens as soon as conversion is finished. If cloud notifications are not enabled then the copy back is handled when the Moodle cron job is run.
The cron job should run frequently. Ideally this should run once a minute so that the student doesn't have to wait long minutes or hours for their recording to be available. Details on how to set up cron and a 1 minute cron example are available here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Cron
If cron is not running there will be a message under Site administration -> notifications about that.