I am not finding anything that helps me move my legacy Moodle 1.9x courses to Moodle 2.0. At first I tried the upgrade and it didn't work. Now I have set up a Moodle 2.0 site in hopes of migrating my courses to it. However, there is no place that shows me how to import my legacy lessons to Moodle 2.0. Can anyone help me, please?
I've just been through this David. General advice is to get as far toward 1.9++ as you can get before taking the leap to 2.0+. You tried from 1.9x and ran into problems. We'll need to troubleshoot those problems. Usually it's some non-standard block or module hanging things up. They've got to be removed. So get the 1.9 going again, save a backup of everything, then start deleting listings of blocks and modules which were not part of the original installation. These deletions clean up the database, though if all fails, you've got to have that backup safe someplace.
This process of deleting blocks and modules is really hampered by their not being a list I've seen anywhere of safe blocks and modules. It wouldn't probably be hard for someone to produce one. In addition, there ought to be a rule guiding contributions if there hasn't been one, that the names for modules and blocks given in the settings panels parallel (they do in most but not all cases), the name of the modules at downloads, or in the ftp directories most of us for uploading and installing them. In any case, I hear that it takes some people 4-5 times to get all the darned non-standard modules out.
Before you do any of that though, I figured that the worst part for me if I had to start courses over from scratch, was to resurrect the quizzes and tests I've installed -- over 100 separate files by chapters etc. were uploaded. But I did go to all tests and exported xml files that would be imported my Moodle 2.0 if all else failed. You cannot use a "backup" of a 1.9 course in 2.0. I've found though that once I got the upgrade applied to my courses (hooray), I could then make backups of my courses, download them, and I chose to restore them into a fresh install of monocle which starts without students data of any sort and clean database.
Thanks for this Steve. First, we are using the version provided by our hosted service through CPANEL. The last update was 1.9.9 (Build: 20100609).
When I logged into the CPANEL on the week of the 17th of Dec, there was a warning to upgrade our sites to 2.0 which I naively did. Then everything broke. We had to try to manually rebuild the site back to 1.9.9 and start over.
So, if I understand you, I should be able to take a site backup and restore it to the new 2.0, but I would have to remove all of the non-standard blocks and plugins. At the present, the only non-standard addition is the theme we are using. Should I convert to a standard theme before I do the backup?
Moodle 1.x themes are one of the things that are not compatable with Moodle 2.x - the entire theme engine has been rewrittern so all custom themes will need to be rewrittern for Moodle 2.x
Your site back ups should allow you restore your site to the exact state it was before you tried the upgrade (that is as long as you have the three magic parts to your site back up - moodle-data files; moodle web files and a text dump of your database); if you do not have these three things you are going to struggle... But then again you should not reallybe performing any type of upgrade without those three things in place first.