Martin Dougiamas

There's a couple of upgrades broken in the previews so it would be a good idea to start again with your 1.9.x installation next time you try a 2.0 upgrade.

I notice you have PHP 5.2.6 - this is lower than the required 5.2.8, perhaps that's an issue here.

Also, the themes will definitely need to be recreated. 1.9 themes are not compatible at all now.

Otherwise, can you be more specific about the exact errors you see? And turn on debugging in config.php.

$CFG->debug = 38911;
$CFG->debugdisplay = true;
define('MDL_PERF' , true);
define('MDL_PERFDB' , true);
define('MDL_PERFTOFOOT', true);

If you mean the new stuff in the Settings menu, then yes, that's gone now ... it was getting really really long and not that useful.

Once you have selected "Turn editing on...", you should still see the "Add a resource..." and "Add an activity" menus in the sections within the course itself though.

The point of a forum is that you have a central threaded discussion and a permanent record. Each user can choose if they want to get copies via email or not.

Letting everyone email everyone else directly means you never really know what is being talked about and whether everybody had the opportunity to see it.

Also, in a forum, everybody has an opportunity to learn from everybody else.

Thanks Basil - good to see you having a go with the Moodle 2.0 API and writing the code you need.

(Please don't attach code in the forums as a general rule ... best approach is described here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Overview#Development_processes )

About getting this feature into core, I have some reservations about it to do with the overall design of Moodle as a course management system.

I've observed over time that teachers new to online learning tend to use just the tools that they know, and they all know email. The default position thus tends to be a teacher-centered view, and providing features to send and receive files just reinforces this. Before you know it they'll be struggling along with hundreds of files whizzing back and forth in an unstructured way, with no connection to other tools, no social engagement and no real management. They might as well have stayed in their dedicated email program which does that better than Moodle ever could.

The whole point of Moodle is that it structures these activities on a case-by-case basis. If you want to ask all the students to send you something, you make an assignment (doesn't have to be graded). If you want people to share files in groups, use a forum, where everyone can learn from them. If you want them to collaborate to build a reference, use a database activity. And so on. Think about the use cases.

Messaging was designed for notifications and disposable instant messages, close to Jabber, ICQ and Twitter. We really need to think if it makes sense to start storing potentially gigabytes of permanent files in there.

Well, actually not necessarily ... I was going to remove it but I wonder if it isn't important enough to stay on course pages - to give new teachers a hint on how to start editing stuff. I had actually been planning to leave it as it is. The front page is less important, admins can figure that out more easily.