10 September 2009, 9:25

Hi,

 We've recently installed Mahara (andlinked it to our moodle) and are intending to pilot it this academic year.

However, we have now spotted that we have Mahara 1.2.0 alpha dev 3 (2009070900) (downloaded from the mahara eduforge page)

We are running on  Red Hat Linux 5 Enterprise, with php 5.1.6 and mysql 5.0.4

Our term starts last week of September and we are looking to populate the site with information over the next couple of weeks, before using it with students.

We realise this is probably not the best version to be on for a pilot, will we be able to upgrade from this version through to the betas and the stable 1.2 branch as it is released, or are we better off biting the bullet now and reverting to a clean install of the stable 1.1 branch (currently 1.1.6)

Thanks in advance for any advice

John

10 September 2009, 10:39

Hi John,

greetings from Germany ;-)

It's great that your institutions want to work with the best tool in town.

But unfortunately  your decision to install a alpha version is not very optimal.Nigel and the other core developers always point to the fact that there is no upgradepath from an alpha version to stable version.

It's best to install the latest stable version and do an upgrade if 1.2 is avaiable. If the admins have a way to install Mahara with postgresql -> do it!!!!!

HTH

Heinz

10 September 2009, 10:51

Thanks Heinz,

We'll reinstall 1.1.6, however, we don't have Postgresql experience on our systems team  so we'll have to go with mysql.

Best

John

10 September 2009, 16:47

Hi - as Heinz says (and as we constantly tell him ) - it's not safe to use the alphas or betas for a production site. We're liable to change things without notice, and certainly without testing whether they'll affect previous development versions.

Case in point - I've been tweaking the LEAP2A export quite a lot, which means exports from the 1.2 alphas won't be compatible with the betas or the final release. I'm not bothering to make them work because it would take too much time. Only from the 1.2 release will we make sure that any upgrade will work.