upgrading from Moodle 1.94 to Moodle 2.2.... how hard is it?

[kprabuck_2008]

Hi

I'm the Assistant Network Manager at a College in Devon and have responsibility for our VLE, we currently use version 1.94 and want to upgrade to 2.2 in the Summer break. However, I have heard that it is quite complicated and am slightly worried as I haven't carried out a Moodle upgrade of any type before!

 

We host our Moodle Server on site and run it off Windows 2003 server. Has anyone else done a similar upgrade or would folks recommend buying in the services to get it upgraded, taking into account the theme we had designed won't work in 2.2 anyway.

 

Any advice or comments would be very much appreciated.

 

Cheers

[glennda]

I would take a copy of the DB and test it out on a seperate instance.

 

You need to make not of what plugins/modules you currently use and see if there are moodle 2.2 compatible versions. Also recreate the theme and then overwrite the web files - this will upgrade the DB.

 

I would test a couple of times before the move though!

[Achandler]

As Glenda said take a backup first.

 

How hard is it? well you cannot go from 1.9.4 to 2.2 directly, you must go via 2.0.4 and 2.1.4 first (well a month ago you had to). You should also be on the latest 1.9 before you try to go to version 2.0

 

If you are moving to a new server then it is easier because you have more mess up time, and more time to check everything. Some things to look out for are "legacy files", you will need them! What plugins won't work (probably most).

 

If you have time then do a trial run on a new server from a backup, and you will iron out all the bugs. I've done it, although on Linux and it wasn't hard but it was time consuming and very annoying at times.

[andyrite]

We went for a new install instead of an upgrade.

[MrEprise]

How hard is it? I thought it was very hard IMO. After several attempts at upgrading ours to 2.0 and getting an "Incorrect pool file content" error each time I thought it best to create a new 2.2 install and move content somehow over to it.

 

Given how populated our existing install is (i.e. very), it was both a shame and so very irritating that the upgrade didn't work but I was wasting so much time on it in the end that we just decided the best course of action was to create new and go from there.

[FN-GM]

Just tried to upgrade from 1.9.17 to 2.2.2 today (test site) and its complaining that my database has a mix of UF8 Unicode and General. The database and all tables are in Unicode as they should be