Need advice: Upgrading from 1.6.3 to 5
How Do I?
I have a client who contacted me about a site I built a long time ago that’s still running 1.6.3. He needs to migrate off EngineHosting pronto, and I have a feeling I’m going to run into issues with PHP versions and things like that when trying to make the transition. I’d like to upgrade him to the latest version in the process of migration. What am I going to run into?
I know I have to go 1 > 2 > 3 > 5 if I’m understanding things correctly. Are there breaking changes in templates and things that I’m likely to run into, or should it be pretty smooth?
The only plugins I’m seeing are as follows. I’m not suer anymore if any of them are third party or not:
- XML Encode (v.1.2)
- Magpie RSS Parser (v.1.3.4)
- Word Limiter (v.1.0)
- Excerpt (v.1.0.3)
- Character Limiter (v.1.0)
- Randomizer (v.1.0)
Any advice before I embark on this would be helpful. I’ve been out of the ExpressionEngine loop for years, as flat-file based systems worked better for the types of projects I was building. I know I can handle it, but don’t want to run into unexpected issues if I can help it.
The big issue with upgrades is add-ons, but if that’s all he has, it shouldn’t be a problem. All of those either have replacements or v5 versions.
For php versions, you want to end up on php v7, but v1 won’t work on php 7.
Technically, you should be fine using the v2 upgrader on php 7, so you could try going straight to that on a new host. I tend to like having the site up and working before I upgrade it to reduce errors, but it should work. Alternatively, you could pull it down locally, run php 5.6 and get v1 loading. Then upgrade locally and move that database up to the new server. Either should be workable.
Make sure they don’t have any third party extensions or modules, I’m assuming you looked there, but it’s easy to forget about extensions. Also- any php in templates using old EE syntax would need updating.
But if that’s all of the third party add-ons and you don’t have any custom php in templates, it should be generally smooth.
Thanks! This is helpful.
And I’ve successfully upgraded the local copy. I ran into a couple of issues (like needing to set the mysql driver to mysqli in the config). When I upgraded to version 3, I tried 3.11, but kept running into a duplicate column issue that wouldn’t go away. Dropping back to 2 and going to 3.10 instead seems to have resolved the issue. All the forum posts I found about the error I was getting just said it “started working” and they didn’t actually know how they fixed it, so… 😊
One thing you can do if you run into an issue- whatever version number shows in the config.php, that’s the last update file that completed successfully. You can go into installer/updates/ and find the NEXT update file and comment out the bit giving you a problem. So if it’s trying to create a field that already exists, you can skip that bit. Every now and then you just need to muscle it through.
But- sounds like you’ve got it squared away?
Yep, everything looks great. Thanks!
Hi Fitzage. I have a similar situation with a bit more urgency. Would you be able to make time for a phone call to allow me to pick your brain on “migrating very old EE sites”
-Joe ([email protected])