Henry contacted me with a couple requests, one being a development environment, the other wanting to know if we could update the moodle version. This caused me a little angst because I know that i cannot upgrade beyond moodle 2.6 until i update the PHP and MySQL first.
BUT, I have leaned in my experience not to overreact or create angst for myself until I have clarified what was being asked for. Talk to the person. Listen to them and get a better feel for what they are asking for. Many times, what they are asking for and how they can get there are very different than what was communicated to you. This case was no different.
After speaking with Henry, I found what he was trying to do and that the version of moodle in place, 2.6 was fine. No upgrade to 2.7 - 2.9 was necessary. Besides, we were not going to do that anyway, at least not in the short term. My colleague Mike helped me phrase an initial response which was something like " Organizationally, we did not have plans to upgrade our moodle instances until the winter. Which would give us time to practice/solve our infrastructure upgrade.
After listening to Henry, what he was really trying to do was to understand how to organize content in the two existing moodle courses. We spoke about course formats and about moving content off the course page into a page activity. To avoid the scroll of death. Which is when course developers do not adequately understand moodle, its activities and how to organize a large amount of course content.
To my point. A couple hrs later, Henry contacted me with a link to a plugin that he thought was what he wanted.
Looked fine to me. A plugin from moodle rooms, reliable. Installing a moodle room plugin requires another plugin, in the local moodle directory. Fine. After reading about the plugins necessary. I went to my moodle server, backed up the database, just in case! Downloaded the plugins - and placed the into the appropriate moodle folders. Then I browsed the site to finish the install and was greeted unexpectedly by this error message.
I found a plugin for Moodle for what I'm trying to do. Here's the link. Let me know what you think.
Hmmm, dependencies check usually means something else has to be updated before what you are trying to update/install will work. I get that. BUT - this message was no clear to me what needed to be updated. I knew my moodle version was 2.6.1 and the plugins I downloaded were for moodle 2.6. I spent a little time searching for the requires version number highlighted in red/pink. But did not find that version anyway. blood pressure starting to rise.
I really did not want to have to *complicate the plugin install by upgrading my moodle instance - but, that seemed the logical recourse. I downloaded the tip version of moodle 2.6, unzipped it and upgraded from moodle 2.6.1 to 2.6.11. The upgrade was pretty innocent, only 4 plugins to upgrade. After the moodle upgrade was complete, I put the plugins back into their respective locations, browsed the site again and wallah, no dependency messages and it about 15 seconds the plugin installation was done. Blood pressure decreasing.
I actually tried this first on a test instance to be sure i would have to issue (the moodle upgrade then the plugin install).
Moral of the story?
I guess its make sure your moodle site is at the TIP version of its instance prior to attempting to install plugins.
Cheers.
Still love reading about your work adventures!!
ReplyDeleteHi Shirley, I think this is you - with that tag line!
DeleteJames