Atutor

Atutor LMS

Atutor is an LMS built with PHP mySQL. Technically, LMS is an abbreviation for Learning Management System. Two examples of learning management systems are Moodle and ATutor. that can be used to manage students and teachers. Atutor is a good choice for your learning management system since it starts you off strong built-in features; such as messaging, creating courses and almost unlimited expandability options.

Atutor can be hosted on servers which use php and mySQL. During installation, Atutor does a check for your server and shows any compatibility issues you may have. Chances are, you will be okay.

Atutor Theming

The lighweight PHP / mySQL application called Atutor LMS can be used for your learning management system. The themes can be found in your themes folder. Many other files which you may want to edit are located in the include folder.

The files which may require editing are header.tmpl.php and footer.tmpl.php. Themes can easily be altered and edited with a little css know-how. The file style.css, which is located in the theme’s folder is where you may want to alter the layout. Neveretheless, there are two more files which have significant affect on the website; header.inc.php and footer.inc.php. These two files are located in the ínclude ‘folder’.

ATutor Changing Folder Names or Directories

By default, ATutor upzips with the name Atutor. You can FTP the folder into a desired website or folder. However, there are a couple of small changes that need to be made for the website to function properly.

Changes:

1) Open include/config.inc.php2)
Change:
define(‘AT_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘/home/user/public_html/example.com/ATutor/content/’);

Change To:
define(‘AT_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘/home/user/public_html/example.com/newname/content/’);

3) Open mysql database table AT_config

Change the session path:
ie)

Change:
/ATutor/

Change to:
/newname/

Making / Building ATutor Modules

Building modules with ATutor is a straight forward process. They have a module called ‘Hello World’ can than can be used as an example.

Here are a few notes to creating an ATutor module:

Basically find and replace module names:

For example, you would open the files below and change HelloWorld, helloworld, hello_world to mymodulename. Just keep the cases in tact and it you have a module with a new name in a couple of minutes.

After you have a new module, you will more than likely make changes to all index files; like index_mystart.php and index_admin.php. The module.php file is used to add pages which can be accessed through links, etc. The module.sql file can be edited to add custom database tables and data.

August 18, 2014 by kent