How often do you update Moodle?

[Cache]

Just curious really as I venture into the realm of relaunching and developing our Moodle with some staff - how often do you update Moodle?

 

I'm currently testing with Moodle 2.6.3+ and was curious whether it is worth the work in upgrading Moodle every week or whether once a month/only when there is an issue is a better solution. I know really it should probably be every week but we'll see... it seems a bit of a hassle.

[penfold_99]

I voted for other as I would recommend upgrading ever half term.

This allow for a period of downtime that isn't out of hours and if there is an issue with the upgrade you are able to roll back, plus you know it will continue to work until the next upgrade.

 

It is also a good idea to have a mirror of your live site so you can test out upgrades before hand. This can save a lot of pain especially if you are moving php versions as some non-core plugins might not be compatible.

[3s-gtech]

I upgraded ours often, but it has now stagnated - the web server it's on is running PHP 5.3 so nothing newer than 1.9 will run! Should be sorted soon. Do the newer version have an update checker like Moodle and Wordpress?

[witch]

It was such a pain upgrading from 1.9 to 2.0 to 2.1 that I don't ever want to do it again

[dgsmith]

It was such a pain upgrading from 1.9 to 2.0 to 2.1 that I don't ever want to do it again

 

^ This. It has made me terrified to even poke it nevermind upgrade it! I'd imagine any further upgrades now wouldn't be anywhere near as bad, but still it leaves a scar from mental breakdown..

[danbuntu]

I upgraded ours often, but it has now stagnated - the web server it's on is running PHP 5.3 so nothing newer than 1.9 will run!

 

moodle 2 will run on php 5.3.2 as it's minium.

 

As for when I upgrade tend to do it every half term or term break although I will do it sooner if I'm having a specific problem that I know is solved in the weekly release.

 

I also use git for the all the upgrades which makes life much simpler and means that deploying from my dev server to live server is childs play.

 

My own moodle it pretty complex which lots of module and custom stuff. We host a very simple moodle for an external company and their upgrades are directly via git.

[secretlife]

You can see here which versions of Moodle require which minimum versions of php: Moodle.org: Download standard packages

[Norphy]

It was such a pain upgrading from 1.9 to 2.0 to 2.1 that I don't ever want to do it again

 

While I can sympathise, the question that you need to ask yourself is this:

 

What is the bigger inconvenience? Keeping Moodle up to date or having your website defaced because some little turd has hacked your site using a fixed exploit?

[synaesthesia]

Ours is quite overdue (we're on 2.4.something) - the person that used to handle our moodle was an absolute whizz and there's a hell of a lot of uber enhancements in it. That makes me scared to go in for updates! There's a first time for everything though, update testing is booked in for this may half term! Thank god for snapshots.

[3s-gtech]

Ah yeah, 2.0 will work, but LTS finished for that before 1.9, so we stuck with the version with longer support.

[wiseoldowl]

I guess it's all about what you consider to be good practice. Keeping your Moodle 2.x within the core bug or security patch window is probably a good plan. Check out the release dates and create a plan for upgrading throughout the next 12 months. Publish the plan so all stakeholders know what's happening. Keep informed about changes in changelogs and deviate from your published update process only if you need.

[tj2419]

If your just at the testing phase now may be worth testing 2.7 instead. They have announced they are going to be supporting it for 3 years rather than the usual 12-18 month cycle.

 

Moodle 2.7 release notes - MoodleDocs

[unixman_again]

Under the new moodle admin regime (err me!) we will be doing it once or twice a year at the end of term. We also clone it to a test server before we upgrade, as experience has shown that some of the plugins we use, don't work when an upgrade is applied.

[witch]

While I can sympathise, the question that you need to ask yourself is this:

 

What is the bigger inconvenience? Keeping Moodle up to date or having your website defaced because some little turd has hacked your site using a fixed exploit?

@Norphy Website not hosted on Moodle. So there. nya nya nya

[Cache]

Thanks for the replies all, give's me something to think about. Reading some of the replies, once a term or on a major issue seems like a nice balance between the two.

 

I spotted 2.7 had been released so just upgraded the test site this morning and off we went again. I quite like the idea of sticking with an LTS release for a little while too, should hopefully fit in quite nicely with the LTS for Ubuntu.

 

Any more comments/votes welcome though!

[gshaw]

Often for us it depends how quickly external companies update their plugins e.g. TurnItIn doesn't have Moodle 2.7 support yet. We currently would to only go for major version upgrades over summer then minor point releases if there's a very good reason to do them (mainly major security flaws).

 

Next version will need some surgery to move up to a later version of PHP so not looking forward to that! 1.9 to 2.x was a huge leap but a huge change like that isn't likely to be required for a long time. The new 2.7 is an LTS release as well so you've got some stability there for a couple of years

[Norphy]

@Norphy Website not hosted on Moodle. So there. nya nya nya

 

Well, your VLE then. Which is arguably more important than your website as your student's work is hosted there And since it's (presumably) accessible from outside of your school it's just as likely to be targeted as any of your other public facing sites.

 

Either way, you don't want it to get hacked and it would be even worse if it did get hacked using an exploit that gets fixed in a later version.

Edited May 20, 2014 by Norphy

[synaesthesia]

This is my job today! Woohoo!

Running Ubuntu 10.04LTS which puts us a little behind but looking at what's available, our path leads us straight from Moodle 2.4.6+ to 2.6.3+. We needed to upgrade PHP which was quite straight forward - if anyone else needs to do the same, the guide I followed was https://gist.github.com/terwey/6416511 - we're now on 5.4.28. That puts us in good stead for Moodle 2.7 for the future.

 

Postgres looks a bit more complicated; again there's some good guides on moving from 8.3 to 9.1, roughly dumping the database, removing 8.x, installing 9.1, importing, job done (hopefully!). But as we're not looking at 2.7 yet (our MIS integration doesn't support it yet) that's a complication that isn't needed. We're on postgres 8.4.1.7 so hopefully Moodle itself sails through.

 

One way to find out...

[synaesthesia]

Sigh. Moodle. Written by programmers, for programmers. People that write documentation should NOT be programmers.

[synaesthesia]

Gave up. Thank %deity% for snapshots. Didn't like the theme, instructions on Moodle might as well be in latin and don't actually cater for anything slightly out of the norm. Only instructions on site relate to versions of Moodle long gone by. Ah well - it can stay Ye Olde until it's replaced or hosted & maintained by someone else!

[Steven_Cleaver]

Tends to get done in the Summer here as any issues can get sorted and can fully test, this is unless a security issue is found our LEA scan all our web facing solutions so inform us of any issues only happened once when we have had to upgrade Moodle outside this schedule as the LEA warned us of an issue with the version of PHP. We also tend to go back to previous release if we feel this is better or new release is buggy etc.

[robjduk]

lol I inherited a moodle when I started 3 years ago and made it perfectly clear I think I have never touched one before and feel it needs replacing with a different and modern solution so its still sitting there untouched by tech support. I guess its about 1.6 but to be honest I just hope the thing dies as I don't believe most staff use it anyway.