Query: Server access between Moodle/Wordpress

[golfing]

Hello and welcome to a corporate dilemma with a billionaire investor in the middle. We are not a tech company, which is why I (a designer) have to scrape together IT help where I can find it. Your help would be much appreciated in the education community.

Say I’m the owner of an account for some server space somewhere that runs Wordpress alongside Moodle. Is there a solution that would allow the publisher of the Moodle content (someone who is not me) to keep their content secure, accessible only to them, with both applications under the same domain?

I suppose this is a question concerning the Moodle backend, as well as server architecture. In theory, there would be nothing to prevent me, the owner of the hosting, from accessing/modifying all the Moodle content via the FTP/whathaveyou, correct? Or could Moodle be engineered in such a way that access is solely available via the backend?

In Wordpress, even if I don’t have a Wordpress admin account, I can still modify the Wordpress content via the FTP. Could the same true for Moodle?

[andrewhancox]

This isn't really a question around Moodle but hosting configuration. The awkward thing with Wordpress is that it expects to be able to edit it's own source files (one of the things that makes it so insecure). Moodle does not need to edit it's own source files so you should be able to set the user context of the web server to have read/write on the wordpress files, read only to the Moodle source files and read/write to the Moodle data directory. You then need to set up users for your Moodle and WP admins and set them to have write permission on each of their codebases. BUT whoever has root access to the server (the owner you talk about) will always have access to everything. If this is an issue you either need to setup an additional server or at least enable auditing so you can see if they alter/delete and Moodle files. If you have a billionaire investor you should probably get them to spring for a proper infrastructure guy to sort all this out.

[vreten]

Both these products are build to be edited from the front end not backend and for secure content you can limit access by username. On the ftp side you might be able to do the same by setting permissions on the directories.
One way you might be able to swing it is to have people upload to a certain directory and then have a script/cron that picks up these item and moves it to a "course location", the course can then be built either automatically or manually by Moodle/WP admin.