Howard Miller

Auto translate? :-O

Command line PHP and (in your case) "apache" PHP are two entirely separate things. This *regularly* catches people out.

I would only comment that "portal" has a rather broad range of meanings. It might help to give a bit more detail about what functionality you hope to achieve.

I thought I had asked the OP. That was my intention.

There are subtle differences (and not so subtle) between database engines and it's rarely straightforward transferring schema and data.

As you suggest, I would probably be happier setting up a new site with the new DB and transferring all the courses with backup/restore. There are ways of (semi-) automating this task, so it's not outrageous if there are loads of courses.

The browser dev tools are your friend here. I would reproduce this with the 'Console' tab and see if there are any red error messages. I would also use the Network tab (a bit more advanced) and look for any lines that show an error. Clicking those and looking at the response may show something.

You can also turn on Debugging up to Developer and check your PHP/Web server logs to see if the error has caused anything interesting to be logged.