Setting up moodle for public - guest access to site files

My customer sent me a message Friday that said

 "Hi James, we'll need a user name and password for guests will will be logging into the CCLS Resources Repository." this is a moodle site I set up for them.

"Can we make that as simple as possible? Is there any way to create it so it's not email based or requiring any verification?"

"The guests need rights to read, and after downloading they may edit-just not within the site."

I then asked my customer a clarifying question.

Hi Ann, please inform my assertions about what you are asking for. Public users (guest role) on the site need to be able to view and download items (files) uploaded by the content people on the site.  Am I missing anything?"

She said that's it.

So, I set off to modify my moodle settings to automatically log in the guest role and to allow the guest role access to all the courses and future courses and their content.

I started by browsing to the moodle docs for the guest role.

Using the admin. role, I made the following changes to the site configuration

All users will be automatically logged in as guests if you enable Auto-login guests in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies. The standard login page is displayed after users visit page that requires real user login.

I then visited the enabling guest access moodle doc page

I turned on guest access for any new course that will be added to this site.

Clicking on Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Guest access brings up the screen where admin can set defaults for guest access in courses. Guest access can be turned on by default in all new courses and you can also:

I then changed the setting that would automatically log the users into the guest role, no login necessary.

In Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies, you can tick the box so that visitors are automatically logged in as guests when accessing a course with guest access (i.e. they don't have to click the "login as guest button".

I then made sure that I could add the guest enrollment option to each of the existing courses.  This was on by default, but was worth a check. 

In Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins,ensure Guest access is enabled (has its eye open.) This enables Guest access.

I then had to go to each of the existing courses on the site and add the guest enrollment plugin.  The guest enrollment option was already there, I just had to active or display it.

• In Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods, first ensure that you have added "guest access" as an enrollment method, and that it has its eye open.
• Ensure that self enrolment is also enabled.
• In Administration > Course administration > Edit settings, scroll to "Guest access"
• Set the drop down to "Yes"

When I completed these setup changes, I opened a new browser, chrome, browsed to the site and without any login or even clicking a guest_login button, I was able to browse to any of the courses on the site, open it and read/ download files from the course.

How much easier could it be?  The public user can come to the site and download all the wonderful content provided by NYS educators as it applies to core curriculum and teacher resources.