Installing Moodle Ver 2.+

[mamer 0]

Starting from Moodle 2 the task of installing your own Moodle on free shared hosts is becoming kind of difficult compared to the good old Moodle 1.9. The PHP version and Unicode are the most critical requirements that are not available in most free hosting services. Even if you try their script installer if it has Moodle, you end up with either a blank white page or a writing permission error that you can’t resolve.

 

Ideally you will be ok with a PHP 5.3.2 and a MySql 5 with Unicode collation but that seems to a very difficult thing to get from a free host plan.

Some providers give you a link to their cPanel demo where you can find out which PHP version they’re using. The rest don’t say anything about it and you have to register an account then login to the cPanel to find out that they don’t have what you’re looking for. You end up with many accounts that you don’t know what’s good for what. Even if they give you the possibility to select a PHP 5.4 that still doesn’t work because of the maximum execution time limit of 30 seconds or because of the lack of some critical PHP extensions. I’m not going to write any detailed information about that because I already wasted a lot of time on that.

 

After trying out about ten different free hosting services I came across Freehostia (www.freehostia.com/) which offers limited disk storage of 250 MB but with a customizable PHP ini and a selection of a higher version of PHP. Their script installer is able to fix the problem of the Moodle data directory which needs to be outside the web root with some hack in the Moodle config.php and eventually install a working Moodle version 2.1 on your web site. But does that solve the problem? No, because after installing Moodle you’re left with about 130 MB which is not enough to host a decent Moodle course with the required course files and users’ uploads. Also changing the theme doesn’t take effect at all.

 

The end result? I gave up looking around for any freer hosting but still have some hopes in hosting here. Can anyone share their experience in installing Moodle 2.+ on the hosting service that this forum offers?

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I haven't tried to install Moodle here yet, but to give you some information, the accounts use PHP 5.2.17. Based on what you said, that's an issue. I don't know if there's any way to change what version of PHP we're using though. Ideally if you're running a schooling-type site, it's suggested to use a VPS or something anyways as traffic and RAM usage are concerns to be aware of.

[mamer 0]

I haven't tried to install Moodle here yet, but to give you some information, the accounts use PHP 5.2.17. Based on what you said, that's an issue. I don't know if there's any way to change what version of PHP we're using though. Ideally if you're running a schooling-type site, it's suggested to use a VPS or something anyways as traffic and RAM usage are concerns to be aware of.

Updates:

PHP now is 5.2.19 . I managed to install Moodle2.1 which is working fine.

I tried Moodle 2.2.7 and 2.3.4 bute were not stable and script will give lots of "Error reading/writing database" error type in many ocasions.

On Moodle 2.1 I managed to restore old coursed made with Moodle 1.9. But you will be always limited by a size of 8MB for your backup files otherwise the restore and backup operations will break and throw that nasty database read/write error.
Edited February 10, 2013 by mamer (see edit history)

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Updates:
PHP now is 5.2.19 . I managed to install Moodle2.1 which is working fine.

I tried Moodle 2.2.7 and 2.3.4 bute were not stable and script will give lots of "Error reading/writing database" error type in many ocasions.

On Moodle 2.1 I managed to restore old coursed made with Moodle 1.9. But you will be always limited by a size of 8MB for your backup files otherwise the restore and backup operations will break and throw that nasty database read/write error.

Is the 8MB backup problem with PHP's version/settings itself, or something with Moodle? Wondering if there's a way around it (like manually copying all the files and just exporting the database, then zipping it all together and considering that a backup).

[mamer 0]

Is the 8MB backup problem with PHP's version/settings itself, or something with Moodle? Wondering if there's a way around it (like manually copying all the files and just exporting the database, then zipping it all together and considering that a backup).

The 8MB is a limitation of the maximum upload size set by the server php.ini and in a shared hosting you can't change that as you know. Inside Moodle, the settings of the maximum file upload will be always limited to that php.ini configuration.

The best practice for backing up Moodle courses with large size of resources is to do the backup in several parts, that's to say backup topics 0-3 for example, then topics 4-7 and so on. Making sure that each back up part is less than the 8MB limitation. Restoring those parts will be done easily without errors.

Copying the course files doesn't work in versions after Moodle .9 because files are no more visible in the data directory and consequently any work you do with the database in terms of updating tables will be pointless and might result in database errors and breaking of the db integration.

From an amateur developer point of view I was very happy with Moodle 1.9 because I was able to tweak it anyway I like but in Moodle 2 I still have a lot to learn. From an administrator point of view Moodle 2 is much much better.
Edited February 13, 2013 by mamer (see edit history)

[rpgsearcherz 5]

The 8MB is a limitation of the maximum upload size set by the server php.ini and in a shared hosting you can't change that as you know. Inside Moodle, the settings of the maximum file upload will be always limited to that php.ini configuration.
The best practice for backing up Moodle courses with large size of resources is to do the backup in several parts, that's to say backup topics 0-3 for example, then topics 4-7 and so on. Making sure that each back up part is less than the 8MB limitation. Restoring those parts will be done easily without errors.

Copying the course files doesn't work in versions after Moodle .9 because files are no more visible in the data directory and consequently any work you do with the database in terms of updating tables will be pointless and might result in database errors and breaking of the db integration.

From an amateur developer point of view I was very happy with Moodle 1.9 because I was able to tweak it anyway I like but in Moodle 2 I still have a lot to learn. From an administrator point of view Moodle 2 is much much better.

Got ya!

Wouldn't just backing up the entire database manually (via phpmyadmin) work fine for avoiding that limitation? Then you can keep the entire backup in one file and not have to worry so much (for the database). The files could just be copied as well, or use cPanel to do an entire site backup.

Not sure what you meant by files not being visible in the data directory anymore but I'd think a full site backup would cover anything and everything.