you can upload the new moodle into another subdirectory on the server
so instead of your access being www.yourwebsite.com/moodle
it would be www.yourwebsite.com/testsite (or what ever you call the directory)
who ever sets up your web pages/server etc should be able to create a new director on the server for this
So if we set up a 'test' site as above, and I make the design changes, edits to my courses, etc. can the /testsite one be transfered to the /moodle site (our live site) or will we loose anything we have done in the test-site?
For some reason our tech. guy seems to think that if we do it as a test site, and then transfer it to our live site, we will loose all of our work and it will just revert to the old information.
We dont' want to 'work' on our live site, we want to make a new site (but using our existing data) and then make that the 'live' site.
Typically when people are making major changes to their moodle site (the look of it) do they just work on it live? Our concern is that as we are testing things out, we don't want students going to our site, and it changing every day, until we get our final look of what we want.
Thanks for your help!
If you are only upgrading the look of your site, and you want to update your courses, do your course updates to the existing production site. Or, perhaps by preparing them in the test site and use the standard backup and restore process to delete existing course information and install the new courses. When your test site is ready just, copy the config.php and moodledata folder, then copy or FTP everything to overwrite the existing files. DO NOT overwrite your database and make sure you have used exactly the same course structures to suit your moodledata folder and database. Restore your confg.php file and perhaps your moodledata folder.
The connectionless nature of the Moodle will allow you to replace all the Moodle files without altering anything in your database or moodledata folder. The config.php file supplies the basic information the Moodle needs to run, the Moodle data folder contains all the files, binary, text, pdf, Word, spreadsheet files each course needs. The course resources and activities, et.al, are stored in the database.
My suggestion is to do this in stages.
Stage 1, make all the changes to your courses you want. This can often be a major step of itself.
Stage 2, in your test Moodle do what you need to do to bring it to a point where you are happy with it. Then, replace your existing Moodle files with your test Moodle files, but make sure you retain the addins and plugins and any other modifications you have made in your production site.
HI Colin,
Thanks for your help.
I am going to be changing pretty much everything! We want to change our theme/design, I am hoping that i can use either a theme on here to download and use, but changing the color scheme to match our website, or to use one of the standard templates (the one with rounded corners) provided by moodle, but again, we want to change the color of the theme to match our business colors. We also want to change our logo/banner at the top.
On the front page we want to completely revamp it to include new blocks and features. We will be changing all of our courses with new blocks/features, and new layout/format, and new content.
If we set up a 'test' site on our server, so for example currently we have:
oursite.com/moodle, and we create a second site called oursite.com/test (just as an example) or moodle 1 and moodle 2, can this be done using the same database on our server? Will moodle1 and moodle2 both function off of using one database on the server?
I have never worked in our cpanel, so I have been reading instructions on this site about adding in themes, adding logo, changing color etc. but I am not comfortable making such changes on our live site, as if I do something wrong, we can't 'afford' our site to be down and not working, while we have courses running - all Summer long. We don't have a time where we don't have courses running.
If we get our 'test' site the way we want it, we are concerned about overwriting the files, and loosing data when we put it to our 'live' site.
Even if you get to the point that you have to delete your theme from the server, because you made a mess of it...be it live or not. Standard Theme kicks in (as default theme) and you can then re-assign a theme to your Moodle again.
In all of this your CORE components of Moodle are not affected. Neither are your courses and other associated files.
Themes are separate and self contained...that is providing you don't make changes to files outside of the Theme folder.
Making changes to CORE elements of Moodle is NOT recommended as this will surely lead to failure at some point if you don't know what you are doing.
Hope this helps?
Mary