upgrade to phpbb3
Yesterday I had the pleasure(!?) of upgrading a client’s site from phpbb2 to phpbb3. It actually took me alot longer than it should have, if I had bothered to rtfm. But once I figured out how it worked, it’s nice.
In particular what I liked about it is how it leaves the forum being updated untouched, meaning if anything goes wrong you still have it around to do it again. One of the things that would have been nice is if the process had clearer explanations on the screen of what you needed to do.
Actually, I just did a big delete of what I wrote since I realized that yesterday I actually did two different things: 1) converted a phpbb2 forum to phpbb3, and 2) upgraded a phpbb3 3.0.0 forum to 3.0.1. Both processes were nice
I did the conversion from phpbb2 to phpbb3 on my laptop. Assuming you have a phpbb2 forum up and running, he basic steps are:
Convert from phpbb2 to phpbb3
Approximate steps as I did this yesterday, and didn’t write it down.
- Install a fresh instance of phpbb3, (Do not remove install directory yet)
- i.e, with its own database, directory, etc
- Return to install page; e.g, localhost/phpbb3/install
- “Convert
- Click on the convert tab
- fill out database information from the original forum — database name, database username, etc
- one thing that got me was the “path” to the old forum. It wants the relative path to the on disk location, not the url location.
- it’ll check you have everything(though this might be before the database info, i don’t remember)
- click convert. it’ll take while depending on how large the database is.
- it’ll give you a “complete” message and that you can login to your board now
- this is not in fact correct. you have to delete or move the install directory before the board becomes active. This had me stumped for a little bit
I dumped this database and imported it to the servers database. Switched the configuration file for the existing phpbb3 install to point to the new database. Conversion complete. As I went through the admin screens I noticed the software was “out of date” and needed to upgrade to 3.0.1. So that was next.
Upgrade from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1
The admin screen that showed I was “out of date” also had a link to phpbb.com to get the upgrade. I almost made the mistake of downloading the full version, as you need to download the “automatic upgrade” version. But the links takes you to a page where the first thing you see is a download of the full version. I had to scroll down to find the “automatic upgrade” version.
So you download it and extract it in your phpbb directory, the same directory that has the config file. It creates an “install” directory with the necessary files. Point your browser at the install directory. The process is actually really simple, with one exception — which is probably where I should have rtfm.
First off it’ll upgrade the database. I had zero problems with this part of it. The next step is it compares the files in place with the new ones and lets you select to merge them, use the new ones, or use existing ones. Once you have done that, you can then select to either ftp the files to localhost, or download them. Since I don’t have ftp setup on the server, I downloaded and then reuploaded them and extracted the archive to the phpbb directory.
Aaargh.
I had selected “use new files” which overwrote the changes the designer had made, so we had the old phpbb2 forum content in a brand spanking new default phpbb3 install. Luckily, we have backups of the css files and images we created so it’s really just a matter of restoring those to get our custom design back.
But this last piece of upgrading the files was where some more on-screen information would have been helpful. The process is to:
- Compare new and existing files
- Select whether you want new version, old version, or merged version of the file in question
- download/upload the selected files
- extract into phpbb root directory
- remove install directory
- Profit…..no, that was something else
That process wasn’t clear on that page. Again, if I had bothered to rtfm, I probably wouldn’t complain about it not being on screen, but it is a webpage for goodness sake. It can’t be that hard to add.
In the end though, it worked. It was clean and easy. I had some bumps on the road, but I’m as much to blame for that as anything. And besides me overwriting the designer’s files, it all went without a hitch. In particular, I liked the way the phpbb2-to-phpbb3 conversion leaves you with the original forum and doesn’t touch it. That’s a nice touch. And with the exception of not enough on-screen explanation, the “automatic” upgrade process was also really nice.
Nice job phpbb folks!
