Thread

We want to upgrade from EE 1.4.1 to 1.6.7.

Our website is three years old and has been unsupported during that time.

What is the best way to do this upgrade through 11 versions?

To follow the suggested procedure of installing and upgrading the site one version at a time requires that we recreate the original production environment on a local machine, so we can do the development there without effecting the live site, right? We tried to recreate the original environment, but couldn’t.

The production environment for the site when it was developed used: EE 1.4.1, MySQL 5.0.45 and we don’t know the Apache version.  The failed environment used EE 1.4.1, MySQL 5.1.36, Apache 2.2.11, php 5.3.0. We can’t get the old versions that were actually used to build the site.

If we can’t create a local environment that works, how can we upgrade through the versions, one at a time? Is the only alternative to set up a completely up-to-date environment and rebuild the site from scratch?

Thank you.

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Welcome to the ExpressionEngine forums, Amaravati Buddhist Monastery.

I wouldn’t worry too much about replicating exactly the same environment, as long as it it is very close. In fact, I’d have it be the same as the environment it’s going to live in eventually.

Updates aren’t going to be one version at a time, you’re going to be going from 1.4.1 all the way to 1.6.8 (which was released a few days ago.)

The install processes looks at your config.php file, and figures out which database changes it needs to make, and then makes them one at a time.

Back up your database before attempting to upgrade, and make sure that the memory allocated to PHP is adequate. In many cases, I recommend 64M.

HowTo Override Memory Limitations

Hello
We took your advice and decided to do a trial upgrade. We managed to re-create the production environment as close as possible on another machine.

We downloaded the latest EE1.6.8 version, followed the upgrade instructions but have observed ‘funny’ html output on almost every single page of the website following the upgrade. I can confirm that the upgrade ran all the way to the end successfully without any ‘fatal’ database failures.

I have attached the following files:-
1. Sreenshot of a sample page before and after the upgrade
2. Page Source for the sample page before and after the upgrade
3. EE Template code for the sample page before and after upgrade (saved in UNICODE format)

Can you tell us what might be going wrong, what we need to do next and what else you need from us to diagnose the problem?
We want to upgrade without impact to our website as soon as possible.

Thanks and Regards

Part of the problem is that it looks like you have curly quotes in place - the ones that Word uses. Did you do any sort of editing to your templates?

Hi
No we didn’t edit any of the templates after the upgrade. Also I believe the curly quote problem is observed in the template before the upgrade, NOT the template post upgrade.

Also have you noticed that the upgrade has changed the content of the template code itself? Please compare the Before_Upgrade_Template_Code.txt and After_Upgrade_Template_Code.txt files and you’ll see what I mean.

Why are we observing the strange content in the html after the updgrade?

Regards

I don’t have a text compare application handy right now. Other than the smart quotes issue, I’m not seeing what else could be the issue.

Could you be more specific?

attached is a picture of the template code after the upgrade. The bits outlined in the red box is what the upgrade process has inserted additionally and therefore not in the original template.

Why has the upgrade done this?

Also, are you saying that if we update the template after the upgrade to remove the curly double quote that the problem we are seeing should disappear?

Exactly what are we supposed to do? Edit the template and put it in which character?

Did you mean to attach a new image?

just attaching a file in this post.. has it come through?

I’m seeing it now.. Upgrading from 1.4.1 to 1.6.8 - not sure if there would have been template changes like that. Let me ask the dev team. Thanks in advance for your patience.

Did you have template exporting turned on? It sounds like that’s what’s happening, an older version of the template is in the database maybe? The update won’t change templates like that.

Ok let me know… in the original attachment, i also attached the page source for the html output before and after the upgrade. Maybe that will help you also.

keep us posted on what we need to do next
thanks

What do you mean by template export turned on?

All we did was save a backup of our db via the Admin -> Utilities -> Database Backup option in Expression Engine, and copy and paste the sql contents into the trial database. Then ran the upgrade and tested the trial website. We did not alter the templates after the upgrade.

Can you please explain why a template has been corrupted in the upgrade process.

Also why is the page source of the upgraded file look corrupted?

Its almost as if EE is not parsing the template file.  if you look at the <title> tag, there are lots and lots of <rdf:RDF ...> tags inside it.

thanks
regards

Sue wanted to know whether you were, perhaps,  saving your templates as files? The changes you see in your template certainly do not stem from the update.

Hello Ingmar, Sue
I checked the settings on the global template preferences and we have not got it set up to save template files to a directory. Below is the screenshot for the global template preferences.

Also, I updated the template file to get rid of the curly quotes, saved it and refreshed the content by doing a Ctrl-F5. There was no change to the page output. Still looked weird -see the original post and the screenshot of page after the upgrade.

Some questions:-
1. Did we do something wrong with the backup and restore of the production database by copying and pasting the production sql file into the Trial database?

2. Is there a syntax problem in v1.6.8 when you embed weblogs within the <title> tag? this is the excerpt from the template file after the upgrade…

<title>Amaravati Buddhist Monastery | {exp:weblog:entries weblog={community_info_weblog}} {title}{/exp:weblog:entries}</title>

the page source on this for the output after the upgrade looks strange with all kinds of <rdf:RDF…> tag

appreciate respones to these specific questions
regards