Serious problems with the rendering of HTML. Before upgrading to Moodle v1.8 (on April 16th and updated again today), I upgraded to the latest v1.7+ (from v1.7). I use the CVS release and now I am using the uk CVS server. The upgrade went smoothly and appeared to work properly. Unfortunately, I missed checking the wiki --all is not well there. The problems:

  * The first and most pressing problem is the fact that wiki pages with HTML will not render past a certain "random" point. Specifically, past that certain "random" point, it stops rendering the page whenever it finds an opening HTML tag --any tag. This has been happening on the longer pages in the wiki (i.e., rendering of a page) AND in the mail outs of longer forum postings (although it looks fine in the web browser).

  NOTE: This is independent of the web browser used.

With the wiki, I may have to "reset" it somehow. While no data was lost in the migration and it still appears in the edit when I use standard forms to "edit" a page (it does not with the HTML editor), the following is how it now behaves:

  * If I save a new page with the same content as the old one, the page is still rendered truncated. Fortunately, all of the data is still there for that page --it is just rendered truncated. One can see the full content by editing the page using standard forms --not the HTML editor where it gets truncated.

  NOTE: The attachment is an actual wiki page in my system copied from the standard form box. It rendered fine under v1.7.x+.

  * The set page flags option has all pages marked as TXT. I tried setting them to HTM and it was like playing the lottery --it may or may not set the flags, it may or may not say that it has changed the flags, it may or may not show the check boxes horizontally or vertically. Eventually, I got them to a state where the page will show them and have check marks. It took several submits to do this.

  * After playing with the set page flags above, the history page for the pages now show all past (deleted) versions, but since there were stripped back in the v1.7.x+ days, it shows the pages' current contents (truncated of course, but, fully visible in the standard form edit screen). (Presumably, either I can get rid of this by copying-and-pasting pages form the old wikis to the new ones, or, I'll have to edit the db to fix it up.)

  NOTE: The same problem of truncation occurs if I create a NEW wiki and copy-and-paste the content in. I don't know if it corrupts the history table after playing with the set page flags a bit --I didn't do enough to test that.

  NOTE: I checked a separate moodle set up (i.e., different directory, different Apache mount, etc.) and the SAME truncation issues happen with that one as well. (Those two moodles are the same version and upgrade paths.)

  * Turning off the Tidy filter did not fix anything.


Fortunately, I have only a handful of wikis all having <10 wiki pages. (Thus, a "rescue" of my content can be done. Currently, I have no students using the wiki.)

While I have *never* been a fan of the Moodle wiki I have used it to provide information to students instead of creating resource pages. I have written using a standard form all of the pages by hand so I could hand-tweak the HTML with the HTML editor, etc. changing it all --so I could preserve C++ code and shell commands properly-- as the HTML editor messes around with the text when switching from code view to HTML view and/or upon submission it gets changed.

Any help with the above would be appreciated. Also, where can I get the new wiki that Moodle will have? Given my problems, it might be worth installing it and pasting my old content into the new one.

I am an experienced computer science & system administrator person, so feel free to ask/use any technical jargon.


Sincerely,

Paul Preney, B.Sc., M.Sc., B.Ed.