INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Before installation: Please note that this is ALPHA quality software at
the moment. DO NOT install this on your production server - or at least
don't blame me if you do and it all goes horribly wrong! 


REQUIREMENTS

To install the algebra based question type you will need the following:

1) Already installed copy of Moodle 2.1 or higher. It may work with other
   Moodle versions but this is the only one I have tested it with.
   
2) PHP5: The code uses exceptions and so requires PHP version 5 at a
   minimum. I used this since Moodle 2.1 will require it so it should
   not be an unusual requirement for long. I used PHP 5.3.5.
   
3) If you want to use the SAGE XML-RPC server you will also need XML-RPC
   support in PHP5. Most installations include this but the MAMP 1.7.1
   package does not. If you use MAMP you will need to download the MAMP 
   source code from the MAMP website and recompile PHP making sure you
   call the initial configure script with the flag "--with-xmlrpc".
   
4) If you want to use the SAGE XML-RPC server you will also need a copy of
   SAGE which you can get from here: http://www.sagemath.org/. This should
   be installed according to the instructions on their website.
   

INSTALLING

1) Copy the contents of the "moodle" directory into your top level moodle
   directory. Note that all the files are 'new' so there should be no files
   overwritten. ('cp -iR' are good options to use).
   
2) Go to Site Administration > Notifications and your database should be
   configured. You are now ready to write algebra based questions which
   use the 'Evaluate' and 'Equivalent' comarison methods.
   
3) To run the SAGE XML-RPC server you will need an installed copy of SAGE
   (http://www.sagemath.org/). Edit the first line of the 'sage-server.py'
   file to point to your installed copy of the sage executable. Then simply
   execute the sage-server.py script. It will run a very simple XML-RPC
   server. If the machine you run your moodle server on is different from
   the machine running your SAGE webserver you will need to edit line 191-
   193 of the file question/type/algebra/question.php to point to the
   XML-RPC server. The same applies if you edit the network port. (This
   mechanism obviously needs to be improved!)