Old version needs update
How Do I?
I’ve suddenly been asked to maintain an old version of EE. We’re on 1.6.9, and it’s only used internally.
I’m getting a MySQL 1054 error when accessing form templates, and I imagine no one has even touched these in ages, since no one has mentioned this issue before.
I plan on just migrating everything over to a new version of EE, which leads me to my questions: 1. I need a fix for this MySQL error, just so I have it working until I can upgrade. 2. Is there a way to migrate an old site to a new one? or upgrade to the latest version from a (very) old one?
Regarding #1: The error is shown when editing templates. Error 1054: Unknown column ‘last_author_id’ in ‘field list’. I found an archived post from 2009 about this, but I’m not familiar with the upgrade process, especially from such an old version.
It certainly should be possible to upgrade to the latest version of EE, but to do that you will have to upgrade via EE2 and EE3 along the way - there is (AFAIK) no way to upgrade without going through those interim versions. The changes from EE1 -> EE2 and EE2 -> EE3 are sometimes tricky if you are using add-ons as these also will need to be either updated or your templates / site modified to work around their absence.
The kind of MySQL error you report is unlikely to happen in steady-state, so my guess is that this was introduced last time someone updated the site (or maybe added an addon) - as some part of the site is looking for a column in your MySQL data that is not there. A quick and dirty fix would be to find a MySQL utility (e.g. Sequel Pro on macs, or phpmyadmin etc.) and manually add in a column called “last_author_id” in the field list table and see if that makes issue go away (or flush out other imperfections in your database structure) - a better fix would be (if there is any way to find out) reapply the last upgrade to see if that fixes it.
As ever before you do anything to your MySql data take a backup…
HTH