Wiki

I recently made the mistake of trying to upgrade the basic moodle wiki to another alternative. Several error messages appeared at the end of the installation and the new wiki was not functional. After restoring the site, it turns out that the basic wiki could not access their data tables. The wiki my students were using as a lab notebook was lost. After puttering around I found this method of recovering the data.

My web hosting company uses cPanel and myPHPadim for its user accounts. I logged into cPaner and opened myPHPAdmin. When I looked at the mdl_wiki and other data tables I found the information for the old wiki's still intact. I was able through myPhPadmin to download the wiki_page table as a CSV file to my desktop. Looking at the data on the table I saw that the info for each page was stored as HTML.

So I deleted the wiki module from my moodle and forced it to re-establish new tables. I then created a new wiki on my moodle site.

To create my students pags, I used Excel's sorting and filters to put the data into their groups.

Using a html editor I cut and pasted the pages from the cvs file, onto a blank page in the editor.

I opened the wiki and cut and pasted the pages from the editor onto the wiki page and then saved.

The saved page held all the info from my students lab books.

I'll have them reorganize their notebooks over the coming week.

This is not a method for a super massive wiki. But at least cutting and pasting is easier than recreating everything from scratch.

It might also be possible to down load all the data tables from myPHPadmin, then import them back when you have established the new basic wiki in Moodle (wiping out all the old tables in the process), but I wasn't going to experiement with a site my students are currently using. One disaster at a time please.....