Recommended Conversion Path

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 8:20 am

I like many many other folks in the Nuke community will be making the transition to RN 2.10. I have a pretty good idea of how to do the change over but I thought a clear cut path to converting would be a good idea.

There are MANY here that know way more than I do. Would ya'll please take a moment to explain to those of us less fortunate what you would consider to be the best way to make the transition?

I myself will be going from 7.3 to RN. My issue to many many Modules that I have installed for 7.3. I know there is a database change at 7.5. Will my Mods still work or will I have to change them all over to another format?

Thank You for your time!

Dawg

Involved Joined: Dec 27, 2005 Posts: 296

I second that motion. I've been holding off on upgrading and watching the forums waiting for others to find the mistakes in converting/upgrading. *lol* I know thats not very nice, but newbie is as newbie does. Wink

Especially a list of mods that will be affected, CNBYA anyone?

P.S. Raven, my hardrive "crashed" had to reformat and wipe the whole thing. I feel/felt your pain. Donation is coming after I clean up this mess I made!

registered · Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 10:57 am

Well I suspect there is no easy cookbook answer to this, since everyone will be converting from different flavors and versions of Nuke, and different amounts of 3rd party and custom modules installed.

The best thing we can probably do is attempt the conversion and report back on what you did, how it worked, lessons learned etc.

I will be converting from 7.9 with a few 3rd party add-ons and some custom ones.

I intend on doing something like this:

Use XAMPP or some test/non-production site: Install RN2.10.
Make a copy of my production sites database and bring it down to my XAMPP.
Use mysqldiff or equivalent tool to alter my existing database to match RN2.10.
Point RN2.10 at this newly altered database.
Install my 3rd party add-ons.
Install my site's custom theme
Play with it and see what works and doesn't. Fix, and repeat.

Once I am satisified with how things are working on my test site, I will then go to my production site and do:

Make a copy of my existing Nuke database.
Run the alter SQL on it.
Blow away all the old Nuke files. (I already have a backup).
Upload the new RN2.10 files from my working XAMPP.
Change config.php to point to new database.
Ta-da...new Nuke (in theory! Wink

)

Anyway, that is roughly the plan. Anyone see any holes or problem areas already? Smile

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 11:10 am

I had reservations about the "blow away the old Nuke files" part when I did my conversion last weekend, so I did a replace, then later I went in and deleted individually the files that were in 2.02 but not in 2.10 (see sticky post on that). Reason: as I've customized I've done things like load custom topic images. And I have a few hacks or supplemental programs I use so I didn't want to risk deleting those. I know you would have moved those to your local system and tested ahead of time and that would work too, but people just really need to be careful not to blow away some customization they've done and the replace method will help with that.

I believe that in the phpnuke7.6_docs directory of the distribution there are some database upgrade scripts for Nuke versions up to 7.6 ... getting to Dawg's point. I've not tested them but they might be of interest to some.

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 12:42 pm

fkelly, I agree about blowing away the old files in general, but I'll have which files I need sorted out locally on XAMPP first.

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 7:40 pm

Gremmie wrote:

fkelly, I agree about blowing away the old files in general, but I'll have which files I need sorted out locally on XAMPP first.

I've seen XAMPP discussed on here a few times. Is this just a developers tool? I want something where I can run a test RN version just on my PC and that's it. Will this do that, or is it like a server or something? (Excuse my ignorance in the terminology here) Is it friendly for non-php guru's?

Just want to make sure as I installed something a few days ago that wiped my hardrive....trying to be a little more discriminatory..heh

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 7:49 pm

fkelly, I'm taking inventory here right now, and I can better see the wisdom of not blowing everything away. I forgot about my custom rank icons, smilies, and user uploadable avatars.

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 8:03 pm

srhh, XAMPP is an awesome tool. I would recommend everyone install it and go through the upgrade process first on it before mucking up your main sites. Yes, it allows you to install Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc all on your PC with one click of a button. It is incredibly useful as a test sandbox to play in.

Out of the box it comes with PHP 5, but my host runs PHP 4.something. But XAMPP comes with a .bat file that will downgrade the PHP to 4 for you. So that's two clicks.

It also comes with MySQL 5, and my host has 4.something. But I haven't had any problems with running MySQL 5.

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

registered · Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:47 am

Did anybody look at the HowToInstall manual for complete steps on how to upgrade? Sad

I wrote up many of the learnings from folks in the forums here for the past year and put it in the HowToInstall manual. Might want to take a look there too... Wink

Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 9:29 am

montego wrote:

Did anybody look at the HowToInstall manual for complete steps on how to upgrade? Sad

I will now. Wink

Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:10 pm

Good info in there Montego.

I just did a dry run migration on my XAMPP system. Surprisingly, mysqldiff generated some SQL statements that MySQL did not like. I had to hand edit the SQL until it all worked. I had a few cases where it was trying to specify a default value of 0 for a field that had auto_increment. Apparently you can't do that. And then it tried to alter some default values in some other tables to '', but that didn't work for the type of fields they were. And finally it generated some total nonsense on some drop fields, but it was easy to fix by hand. So all in all, maybe 10 hand edits before the script worked.

I pointed RN2.10 at the newly altered database and it worked! I spent a fair amount of time clicking on things and trying each module out. There were a few minor problems (like I forgot to copy the code over for one custom module), but nothing major.

Next, I wanted to try this alter SQL script out on a copy of my real database since the MySQL versions are a bit different.

I then went to my real site and discovered there was no way to copy my database to another one. I apparently have a partially crippled phpmyadmin that doesn't let you select or work with multiple databases at a time. This is how my host controls the number of databases I get, I guess, since I am limited to 5. So I had to create a brand new empty database via Plesk and then do an export of my existing and then import into the new. However, I just knew the import was going to time out, as my exported database is 9 Megs compressed (gz). So I downloaded that bigdump utility. d*** that thing rocks. I will be donating to that guy. Once I got a copy of my real database imported via bigdump, I ran the alter SQL script on it (I just realized I could have used bigdump for this too) and it went ok.

So tomorrow when I'm fresh I'm going to pull the trigger on the actual upgrade for real. Yikes!

Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 10:37 am

Well I'm very happy to report that I have joined the ranks of the happy RN users.

RavensScripts

Doing the trial run on a test system really helped me know what to expect and helped head off problems before I went live.

Thanks to Raven and his team!

Posted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 9:30 am

I am with you, BigDump is a life saver. IMO, it ranks right up there with other of my critical tools such as FileZilla, Winmerge (or Beyond Compare 2), and Putty.

Glad your upgrade is complete and running smoothly!

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 11:01 am

I've just finished converting two websites from ver Raven7.6.
Both sites are heavily modified, from themes to custom modules to routines like going to the HomePage after login.

First I backup everything twice, and check that everything is on my local machine. (Some hosts have a limit on the number of characters in a file name. ie: if I backup /modules/forums/images/gallery/avatars/someavatar.gif
I might just get
/modules/forums/images/gallery/avatars/some
(what a mess that server change became!)

Also, for db backups I make sure phpmyadmin is doing the right thing with the exported file, ie: it hasn't truncated insert statements, or the entire bottom half, or I've missed the right export setting.

Then I create a new directory: ie: httpdocs_new
I install all the new files to this new directory.

Then I create a new db. And edit config.php to match.

Then I go to my backup.sql and search out all the tables that are not standard RN, ie: traffic, library, coppermine, etc, etc. I copy from the backup into a new sql query into the new table.

Then I do the RN install from httpdocs_new/INSTALLATION/

Then I go back to backup.sql and go through each table one by one.
This is where everything gets interesting because you need to be very careful that you aren't overwriting new stuff with old garbage. So, each table is evaluated carefully before doing anything. Sometimes I don't do anything to a table, sometimes I remove records and insert new ones, sometimes I edit new records using the data from the old record.
Sometimes I had to fiddle with things to get a correct column match.
For example, the standard nuke_user table has 2 new and 1 less, plus I need to add 3 columns for coppermine. With nearly 1,000 records this can be tricky, but using a matching string I can find and replace so the data fits.

Then, I start transferring my custom files, not forgetting the language file edits, or things like custom meta.php. For sure you'll likely forget some images, like topics, so don't delete anything yet. And then I make the edits to the core files for my custom modifications. (Of course, you've been keeping a list of these edits since day 1, right?)

Then, I rename httpdocs to httpdocs_old and httpdocs_new to httpdocs.
If everything has gone well you'll be up and running.
But most likely you'll have forgotten something and it will be obvious as soon as the page loads. So then I fix those things. And voila! it's an upgraded website.

Smile

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:06 pm

CodyG, this is excellent. You all might also want to see this:

http://www.ravenphpscripts.com/postt13016.html