25 February 2015, 6:57

Hello,

We have been using a very old version of Mahara (1.1.6) in conjunction with Moodle (Mahoodle) and are now looking to migrate to a new server with the latest versions of both of these.  There is no plan to migrate users from the existing setup to the new one, but we would like to allow existing users to import their old Mahara content to the new installation if they would like to.  I have been experimenting with upgrading the old installation to a version that supports Leap2A export, exporting a portfolio, and importing it into a new 1.10.2 installation.  For the most part, it is working great.  The issue is that it seems a lot of our users (thousands) have submitted what should have been the body of a blog/journal entry in the description field for the blog/journal.  That field does not appear to be included in the export.  I'm not sure if that is attributable to something about the way the blogs were converted in the upgrade from 1.1.6 or if that description field is just something that Leap2A doesn't allow for.  Any suggestions on getting that data to export?

Thanks,

Mike

01 March 2015, 21:25

Hello Mike,

I don't know if there is a somewhat easy way to migrate journal descriptions to journal entries, but suspect that this might be somewhat tricky as the entries will need a title and also a date when they were created which would not be available on the journal itself unless you choose the date of the journal creation as the date.

Why not try to upgrade your Mahara 1.1 to 1.10? As far as I know, it is possible to do so although it might take a bit of time. That way your users would have their content available and if they didn't want it could delete it. Since you'd have to go to a version of Mahara that supports Leap2A, might as well go to 1.10. :-)

When I export and import a journal with a description in Mahara 1.10, I do get the description exported. So this must have been fixed between 1.2 and now at some point.

Cheers

Kristina

03 March 2015, 14:00

Hi Michael,

To expand on what Kristina said, this behavior works as expected in Mahara 1.10. I created a journal, put some text in the journal's description field, export my account to Leap2A, then import the generated Leap2A file back into Mahara, and in the newly created (imported) journal, I see the description text.

Since it works in 1.10, the easiest fix is probably just to upgrade your site all the way to 1.10 before exporting those Leap2A files.

Or easier still, just use the upgraded 1.10 site as your new live site. The Mahara upgrade scripts still support doing a direct, one-step upgrade from 1.1, and some of the biggest Mahara sites in production today are sites that have been around since 1.0 and even earlier, so this upgrade process is actually pretty well-supported. The main technical problem faced, is that if you have a large site, it may take so long to upgrade all the data at once that you start facing timeout and/or memory limit problems. (In which case you'd want to run the upgrade via the command-line, and/or split it up by upgrading incrementally to 1.2, 1.3, etc.)

Cheers,

Aaron