Moodle in English: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

Hi all,

We upgraded to Moodle 1.6.3+ only two weeks ago. We had waited with the upgrade in the hope that all main errors would be ironed out and that our contrib. modules would have been adapted. The latter worked out, but we are faced with a surprising number of bugs in Moodle (in comparison with Moodle 1.5.4). I have been searching and posting in different forums about these, but I thought I should give an overview, because maybe these have to do with a central underlying problem.

Certain courses that are available to students and teachers and that are visible in the course categories before logging in, become invisible on the course category pages after logging in (to anyone but administrators).
Dates containing Finnish letters ä or ö are not displayed correctly.
Spontaneous generation of (CamelCase) wiki links in Finnish wiki pages.
Uploading users with names containing non-Latin letters (ä, å or ö, but also accented letters) has become very complicated.
Finnish text copied from MS Word to the HTML editor is sometimes not saved.
Preferred language setting behaving erratically (users suddenly see Moodle in another language).
The reset function does not remove all forum messages.
The Excel dump of the gradebook does not work.
Some of the standard themes that come with Moodle do not display properly (navigation bar).

Should anyone have found a proper solution to any of the above problems. I would gladly hear about it.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by A. T. Wyatt - Wednesday, 17 January 2007, 9:46 PM

Greetings, Paul!
I, too, had the theme problem. I thought I was crazy! So I am comforted to hear that you had the same problem. This is one way to fix it, although perhaps inelegant:

find moodle/theme/standard/layout_styles.css
Look for this:

.navbar {
/*width:auto; */
width: 100%;
padding:3px 0.5em;
border-width:1px;
border-style:solid;
}

Comment out /*width:auto;*/ as shown
Add width: 100%;

Another odd thing--for a day, even though the nav bar started behaving better, it still wasn't right. I didn't have time to track down the problem, but the next morning I logged in and everything was back to normal!

You might try it. Having to click the edit button twice and chase it around the screen was not as entertaining after you had done it a couple of times!

If you agree that this is a bug, we probably ought to file it in the tracker. I have not tried to figure out if this particular line of code changed or something else. I am not as good with stylesheets as I would like!

atw

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 3:46 AM

Hi ATW,

Thanks for your feedback, I will try your suggestions. I had expected trouble with the third party themes (and indeed half of them displays some kind of errors, but I had assumed that the standard themes in the Moodle download would have been adapted.

Incidentally, all the errors I listed are not critical, Moodle as a whole functions OK, but they are annoying and cause me more work.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Friday, 26 January 2007, 3:44 PM

Hi ATW,

Thanks, your suggestion worked for the Moodle standard themes and even for some of the third party themes that apparently borrow CSS from the standard theme.

By the way I have another Moodle 1.6.3 issue to add to the list:

Bulk uploading existing users into new courses is no longer possible without also updating their password.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Anthony Borrow - Wednesday, 17 January 2007, 9:55 PM

Paul,

I have been using 1.6.3+ and have found it pretty good (at least in English) for our production site. I am aware that there was a change from 1.5 to 1.6 in course visibility in a hidden category. Try adding to your config.php and see if that helps making the course visible.

$CFG->allowvisiblecoursesinhiddencategories = true;

In wikis, I disable CamelCasing because it will try to create pages out of some of the student's names (for example, Ronald McDonald).

I have been using the the gradebookplus_v2 patch for the gradebook and have on occasion experienced some problems exporting to Excel but I believe this is a caching error because when I go in and modify the file causing the problem (which I refer to as the Biff_Writer error) then the problem goes away and I am presuming that it has something to do with how $this is used. Fortunately, we do not rely heavily on the excel export so I have not had too many issues with this nor opportunity to troubleshoot more extensively to see if it is a PHP 5 issue or an issue with APC. I did notice that Moodle 1.8 has a number of cache related settings.

I would encourage you to add to the tracker the various issues that you are experiencing. Peace.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 4:32 AM

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for your response. As I mentioned above, none of the errors I listed is critical. On the whole Moodle 1.6.3+ functions OK. But these errors make it more cumbersome to use and force us to do some serious editing in some places, which we did not have to do before.

I will try out your suggestion, but I'm pretty sure we do not have any hidden categories. The problem occurs in normal course categories. Lets say a student looks at the category technology and sees 15 courses. Then logs in and when he looks at the same category he now only sees 11 courses; even, and this is very odd, if he is enrolled in any of those missing courses. The course will show up in his My courses block, but will not be visible in the course category. This is a problem if teachers tell students to enroll themselves in a course and the students cannot find the course in the course category. The workaround is to have teachers enrol student manually in their courses, but that is a stop gap solution.

I have also disabled CamelCase in all my wikis but certain teachers thought it more handy than the brackets (and names like McDonald do not exist in Finnish). After the UTF-8 upgrade Finnish letters ä and ö are represented by a code containing Ã and the CamelCase therefore turns any words with two of these letters (many many words in Finnish) into wiki links. Turning CamelCase off will also take away the intended links in these pages and so we have to first turn all the intended CamelCase links manually into bracketed links and then disable CamelCase. We have 278 wikis (admittedly not all of them are affected, but still).

The Excel dump issue is a known bug already. I have tried out several suggested solutions without result. It, again, is not a vital error, the gradebook can be downloaded as a textfile and then renamed as an xls file (in ANSI code) and it will display the information more or less correctly, but that too is a stop gap solution. I might try out the gradebook patch in our test server to see how it goes. I am very apprehensive about fiddling with the gradebook, though.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 4:58 PM

Update:

$CFG->allowvisiblecoursesinhiddencategories = true; did not have any effect, so hidden categories was not the issue.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Jason Julius - Tuesday, 23 January 2007, 5:21 AM

We are also running into the same problem with missing classes in the category view. Running 1.6.3+ with PHP 5 on Windows 2003 with the English language pack. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Jason

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Anthony Borrow - Tuesday, 23 January 2007, 6:14 AM

Jason - What particular version of PHP5 are you using? Is there any discernible rhyme or reason to why those courses are not coming up?

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Jason Julius - Tuesday, 23 January 2007, 7:32 AM

Anthony,
Were running PHP 5.1.6
Here is a couple of examples of what I'm seeing:

Category General Education (32 Courses)
As admin I see 20 courses on the first page (none hidden) and 12 courses on the second page (1 hidden)

As a student I see 11 courses on the first page and 12 courses on the second page - the last course from the first page also appears as the first course on the second page of courses. The courses remain in order so the student ends up with access to the first 22 courses in the list

Computer Information Systems (56 courses)
As administrator I see 20 courses on the first page (5 hidden), 20 courses on the second page (2 hidden), and 16 courses on the third page (4 hidden).

As a student I see 16 on the first page, 14 on the second, and 10 courses on the third page. Again the courses remain in order so the student is missing the last 5 courses.

Thanks in advance, let me know if you need any other information.
Jason

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Jeffery Watkins - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 1:59 AM

Do you have mbstring and iconv installed on the server?

Did you run the UTF migration? Did it run successfully?

Most of the standard themes need to be updated to version 1.6 to work correctly. That is why the navbar and other elements are displayed incorrectly.

Jeff

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 4:11 AM

Hi Jeffery,

Thanks for your response. As to your first question, I will first have to figure out what mbstring and iconv are before I can answer that.

The UTF migration went smoothly and did not cause as many problems in the output (i.e. errors on the pages and in blocks of Moodle) as in earlier tests (which was one reason why we put off the upgrade until now). In the MySql database many Finnish words are displayed with odd codes (for the letters ä and ö) but apparently the program can read those. Some text even looks like Chinese characters.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Jeffery Watkins - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 4:49 AM

Iconv and mbstring are both PHP extensions. If you look under Admin -> Environment you will see if you have them installed.

I know that the Excel gradebook download would not work for me until I had iconv installed.

They both are supposed to help the site when it comes to non-Latin based languages.

I configure PHP with them both:

--with-iconv --enable-mbstring --enable-mbstr-enc-trans --enable-mbregex

Jeff

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 4:58 AM

Hi Jeffery,

Thanks. It says "is recommended to be installed/enabled" Status OK. I guess that means I do not have these extensions. Where and how do I get these? I can try it out on our test server and then I will have to instruct the server admin to install them on our production server.

(And sorry for the double post; a spastic index finger after a long day )

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 3:30 PM

Hi Jeffery,

I have looked up iconv online. There should be a version of it for Windows 2003 server which we are using, but the descriptions of it are Greek to me. I can't find a simple hands-on step by step manual that describes where to get the programme and how to install it. I guess I need to find an IT expert (I can only work with dummy-proof instructions like "unzip file X in folder Y" or "Copy code ABC into file Z at line 123").

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 10:55 PM

Hi again,

According to our IT people PHP5 (which we have) should come complete with iconv and it should only be activated, but when they say how I could do that it goes something like: "Well, you Λυπάμαι γιά όλο το κλίμα που δημιουργήθηκε και αποχωρώ. Δεν μπορώ να καταλάβω πάντως γιατί έγινε αυτό. Γράφω συγκροτημένα, με πολύ καλή σύνταξη και ορθογραφία, επιμελούμαι όσο μπορώ τά άρθρα μου, επιστρέφω σε αυτά και διορθώνω τις όποιες αδυναμίες τους και εισπράττω σαν αμοιβή την στάμπα ότι το άρθρο θέλει συγύρισμα and that's all there is to it really.

All I know is that our config.php or php.ini do not have any iconv settings.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Friday, 26 January 2007, 3:46 PM

Hi Jeffery,

I checked our system with a helpful colleague and iconv is part of PHP5 and according to the test we ran, it is enabled in our system, so unfortunately that road did not lead to a solution for our problem.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 4:43 PM

Hmm, many of these sound related to Finnish conversion to Unicode. I assume you did the Unicode conversion? (It's an extra step after the upgrade).

Are you using custom Finnish language packs? Have you been changing any language character sets?

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 18 January 2007, 11:04 PM

Hi Martin,

Yes we did the unicode conversion during the upgrade. We have fi_utf8 downloaded to moodledata/lang and we have copied it to fi_utf_8_local so that we could add some (utf8) lang files and strings from contrib tools without messing with the original fi_utf8 folder.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Wednesday, 31 January 2007, 5:52 PM

Hi all,

The list of unsolved problems with Moodle 1.6.3. keeps on growing. I wonder if we should retreat to Moodle 1.5.4+ or flee forward to Moodle 1.7 for the continuing errors exasperate our users and jeopardise the acceptance of the VLE.

At least one user's ID has "broken" twice, in the first instance she could not log in anymore (period, no matter what), in the second instance (with a new ID) she cannot enter a course even though she could before and is listed as a student in the course and the course is running normally for the others. The error message say that registering for the course is not allowed (even though in the settings it is allowed and even though the student does not need to register since she is already enrolled.
Quickmail messages in Finnish display with UTF-8 related errors in some mailboxes.
Bulk uploading existing users into new courses is no longer possible without also updating their password.
Certain courses that are available to students and teachers and that are visible in the course categories before logging in, become invisible on the course category pages after logging in (to anyone but administrators).
Dates containing Finnish letters ä or ö are not displayed correctly.
Spontaneous generation of (CamelCase) wiki links in Finnish wiki pages.
Uploading users with names containing non-Latin letters (ä, å or ö, but also accented letters) has become very complicated.
Finnish text copied from MS Word to the HTML editor can sometimes not be saved (an issue with the HTML editor, it occurs in different tools).
Preferred language setting behaving erratically (users suddenly see Moodle in another language).
The reset function does not remove all forum messages.
The Excel dump of the gradebook does not work.

Should anyone have found a proper solution to any of the above problems. I would gladly hear about it.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Wednesday, 31 January 2007, 6:49 PM

Just a guess but if you have a linux server do you have fi_FI.UTF-8 in the list of server locales ?

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Wednesday, 31 January 2007, 8:36 PM

Hi Paul,

I just read your earlier message and noticed that you have Windows 2003 server.

About those extensions: open php.ini and find rows

;extension=php_gettext.dll
;extension=php_mbstring.dll

Take away ; and you should get

extension=php_gettext.dll
extension=php_mbstring.dll

You may uncomment ;extension=php_iconv.dll too. Reboot.

If you have odd codes instead of å, ä and ö UTF-8 migration has not succeeded. Before you run the UTF-8 migration, turn on Standard theme and set English to default language. Run UTF-8 migration only once to a database that is not in UTF-8 character set (for example latin1_swedish_ci). You may install Finnish (utf-8) now but it will be seen after the migration.

When all is done some resources may have strange characters but if you update them characters will be utf8. In Windows 2003 you don't need to set locale, leave it empty at moodle site settings.

If you need help send me email mauno.korpelainen@hyvinkaa.fi

Mauno

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Wednesday, 31 January 2007, 9:10 PM

Read this too: http://fi.php.net/iconv

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 4:13 PM

Hei Mauno,

I looked at the linked page, but I am afraid I don't understand much of it. I will try your suggestions first on our test server to see if they make a difference.

Oh, by the way, ;extension=php_iconv.dll does not exist in our PHP.ini (should I add it?)

Thanks!
Paul.

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 4:42 PM

This extension is part of PHP as of PHP 5 thus iconv.dll and php_iconv.dll is not needed anymore. If you had PHP4 you would need to add it.

By the way, have you tried just using moodle backup links to backup courses + installing a fresh moodle and restoring old courses as new courses. I tested it with moodle 1.7 and there were no errors. I did not have any non standard modules however (which may cause some troubles)

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 5:26 PM

Hei Mauno,

I tried out the PHP.ini settings on our test server, but they seem to have no effect, either for the better or the worse.
Leaving the locale blank does seem to improve the errors in the Finnish dates, thank you for that hint.
We presently have about 1000 courses in two Moodle installations and some 5000 users. You will understand that backing up all courses and restoring them in a new environment is something that we prefer to avoid unless we really have to.
My MySql front page looks like this, as far as I can tell it has the right UTF-8 setting?

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Maik Riecken - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 7:17 PM

My tip sounds stupid, but try the following:

change your profile to the english language => save
change back to finnish => save

Some word are not translated properly in your screenshot. It seems that moodle takes his old language files within your profile.

regards,

Maik

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 9:08 PM

Hi Maik,

Funny thing: my preferred language in my profile is English (and I have reset it many times to different languages and back), nonetheless MySql shows most often in Finnish (as displayed above). This is part of the wandering of the language output that I mentioned as one of the problems we are experiencing.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 8:48 PM

Well at least it looks strange to be correct. Here is my version:

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 9:20 PM

Hei Mauno,

Having seen your pic, I reinstalled MySql-admin and now my view is similar to yours. I did not think that the MySql admin version would influence the output of what I see in the database. Do you think it might also influence the other problems?

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 10:10 PM

I guess not but version of mysql or php might havesome influence. I attach here my system variables for mysql. Compare these to you server mysql variables if you find some difference.

muuttujat.xls

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 10:40 PM

...and from moodle you could check that you have langcache: Yes

and that moodle is using only utf-8 language translation (there should be no other folders than en and en_utf8 in moodle/lang folder)

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Monday, 5 February 2007, 4:26 PM

Yes and yes to that.

Thanks,
Paul.

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Monday, 5 February 2007, 4:27 PM

Hi Mauno,

I will pass on this list to our IT people, for I cannot make heads or tails of it.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Tuesday, 6 February 2007, 3:38 PM

Hi Mauno,

All my IT person points me to is the my.ini file, which contains only a few of the settings in your list. Where do I find all the others? And what do I do with the comparison? Some values in your list are higher and some lower than in our my.ini file. How do I know what is best for our server? (If my IT staff cannot tell me).

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Tuesday, 6 February 2007, 8:43 PM

Hi Paul,

I haven't changed any settings of my mysql after installing it. The only thing you could do is to check that you have same values for

character set client	utf8
character set connection	utf8
character set database	utf8
character set filesystem	binary
character set results	utf8
character set server	utf8
character set system	utf8
character sets dir	C:\MySQL\share\charsets\
collation connection	utf8_unicode_ci
(Globaali arvo)	utf8_general_ci
collation database	utf8_general_ci
collation server	utf8_general_ci

language	C:\MySQL\share\english\

and change your my.ini. Sometimes one fault character may cause a lot of trouble as we have seen many times from moodle config.php last character after ?>

I suggest that you leave your moodle in peace for while and make a fresh new test install of moodle (1.6-1.7-1.8?). If there are no problems move/add new courses to a working environment next summer. Repairing or even finding all possible reasons for strange language behaviour is little stroke of luck...and if there are more people having a same bug someone usually finds a solution too.

That Excel dump bug seems to have a possible solution:

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-5722

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Re: Update: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Thursday, 1 February 2007, 8:55 PM

I suggested this backup - restore course(s) for new install just to test if the problem is in upgrading prosess or your server settings...

I agree that restoring so many courses with this method takes time and brains.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Friday, 2 February 2007, 4:59 AM

Hi Paul,

I have some more possible reasons for your problems: first version of your php. You have not told it but I took a look at your site and with http://validator.w3.org checked errors. That "Dual clock" has some non valid code for example one cellpading (should be cellpadding), there are a couple "&&" and your theme really should be upgraded to moodle 1.6 , look at http://docs.moodle.org/en/1.6_theme_upgrade (it is not critical but...)

You seem to have php 5.1.4 with Windows 2003 server and that is a little "buggy" combination. Downgrading to 5.1.2 might be possible or upgrading to 5.2.0

And one more: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=63630 if you have a couple of non standard modules or blocks there is a risk that one or two of these are not compatible with your moodle...

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Monday, 5 February 2007, 4:34 PM

Hi Mauno,

Thanks for your continued help.
I corrected the cellpadding in the dual clock, what to do with &&?
Being a non-techie, I only try to fix what is broken. The theme seems to work, but I will see if I can improve it.
I will pass on the information about PHP to our IT staff, downgrading is most likely better, with an eye to our contrib modules.
If any contrib modules are not compatible, wouldn't I be getting errors when using them? So far, our contrib modules seem to work with Moodle 1.6.3+ and the problems we experience affect the functionality of standard Moodle elements.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Monday, 5 February 2007, 5:25 PM

That dual clock itself is a small risk if there is some code that all browsers don't understand. Although it is not valid XHTML, "&&" is valid javascript and may not cause any errors. If you have for example modules or blocks that do not produce UTF-8 but for example fi_FI.ISO8859-1 and if they use some same variables as standard modules it may be a problem.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 1 March 2007, 3:25 PM

I have another issue to add to the list:

When we tell students to enroll themselves in courses with the enrollment key, a number of them do not succeed (and we need them to enroll themselves because we cannot enroll existing students from file anymore without changing their passwords).

I have updated our theme by importing as much code from the formal white (1.6) theme as possible.

I really DO hope that all these problems will go away in version 1.7. Otherwise we will have to return to 1.5 and hope that there will be some organisation that can take up the further development and maintenance of the 1.5.x branch.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Dave Shearan - Thursday, 1 March 2007, 11:22 PM

Hi Paul,

I'm surprised that you have problems with students using the enrolment key. It's not something I've come across before except of course when they use the wrong key or they've got the CAPS LOCK key on (and that happens all the time!).

However if you've got a real problem then you can easily manually enrol them through the course itself, just by adding them using Learners in the Administration block (see attachment)

Hope this helps - I obviously don't know much about how your system is being run.

Dave

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Friday, 2 March 2007, 9:07 PM

Hi Dave,

Thanks, we know about manual enrolling, but of course we prefer to spend time on more productive things than enrolling students one by one. We used to upload existing student groups to new courses by re-uploading the user list-file with a different course1 (or 2) listed. In Moodle 1.5 that would enroll the students in that course without changing their ID. In Moodle 1.6 when we do that, it updates the students' passwords, which we do not want to do. A solution would be to have the students enroll themselves using the enrollment key, but now it turns out that numerous students cannot enrol themselves that way (despite using the correct key; these are online students who have been using Moodle for a long time).

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Wednesday, 14 March 2007, 3:50 PM

And a related issue in enrollment via an uploaded file is that users who are uploaded with "fi" as "lang" setting still find that their preferred language is Deutsch and not Suomi.

Many users also report that the Finnish part of our site policy is illegible, because the UTF-8 messes up the text in their browser.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Wednesday, 14 March 2007, 6:35 PM

Hi Paul,

one thing might explain the whole problem: when you upload users from moodle 1.5 with lang "fi" and there is no such language in moodle 1.6 or later (language should be fi_utf8 in table mdl_user, not fi) moodle takes another language. Usually it is en_utf8 but why is it deutsch???? Is your/site default language deutsch?

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Wednesday, 14 March 2007, 10:40 PM

Hi Mauno,

We just follow the instructions in the Moodle help file about uploading users, which gives as valid lang value en or en_us (not en_utf8), but I will see if it makes a difference if I set fi-utf8.

Deutsch is definitely not the site language (Suomi is), but it is the language at the top of our language list and apparently it is chosen by default if no valid lang value is entered.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Thursday, 15 March 2007, 12:18 AM

You could check table mdl_user and variables lang. If some of your students have there value "fi" (lang from moodle 1.5) those values should be replaced with "fi_utf8" (as well as all other utf8 languages should have _utf8 at the end)

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 15 March 2007, 4:24 PM

So, you are saying the Moodle help files are incorrect and need to be updated? And that when the database was upgrade these 1.5 values were not automatically updated to 1.6 (utf8) values?

What is the MySql command to find fi in the lang column of the mdl_user and replace it with fi_utf8? Would it be:
update [table_name] set [field_name] = replace([field_name],'[string_to_find]','[string_to_replace]');

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 15 March 2007, 5:40 PM

A funny thing, with the above command I can change fi into fi_utf8, but when I try to change en into en_utf8 MySql suddenly claims that the data is too long for column 'lang' at row 1. WTF surprise

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Thursday, 15 March 2007, 5:57 PM

Try

UPDATE mdl_user SET lang='fi_utf8' WHERE lang='fi'

and

UPDATE mdl_user SET lang='en_utf8' WHERE lang='en'

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Mauno Korpelainen - Friday, 16 March 2007, 5:07 PM

Command REPLACE changes en to en_utf8 but it also changes en_utf8 to en_utf8_utf8 and lang is VARCHAR(10).

Command UPDATE mdl_user SET lang='en_utf8' WHERE lang='en'
updates en to en_utf8 but it does not change en_utf8

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Friday, 16 March 2007, 8:03 PM

Thanks Mauno,

That was very helpful, I have now been able to clean up the lang settings in the database. I had assumed that this would have been a part of the upgrade.

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Paul Nijbakker - Wednesday, 14 March 2007, 4:10 PM

Hi all,

We get so many complaints about these problems with Moodle 1.6.4 that I wonder if it is possible to return to Moodle 1.5.4 now that the database has been converted to UTF-8? (I see so many messages in the forums about grave problems with the roles in 1.7 that I think upgrading will not solve our problems but rather add to them!) Or are we basically screwed?

I would like to thank everybody for all the kind suggestions, but I do find that so far only one of the issues I listed in this thread has been solved (the problem with the standard themes).

Rgrds,
Paul.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 16 March 2007, 5:49 PM

Paul, it may be that some of these problems are only in your own local installation because of corrupted/mixed files or some environmental issue (eg Windows or Finnish).

Some of them could well have been fixed in later versions of Moodle. (I'd be surprised to see any of these in 1.8, actually)

Since others are having trouble find the solutions for you, you may need to find a php programmer to take a closer look at your server.

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Re: List of issues with Moodle 1.6.3+ so far

by Sven Laudel - Thursday, 19 April 2007, 10:55 PM

Hello,

we are working with Moodle 1.6.4+ and experiencing the same problem "Certain courses that are available to students and teachers and that are visible in the course categories before logging in, become invisible on the course category pages after logging in (to anyone but administrators)."

We are on a Gentoo Linux Box with Apache 2.054, PHP 5.1.x and Postgresql 8.0.11, if this is of interest.

So did anyone find a solution to this problem?

Cheers Sven

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