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Hi there,

I recently joined a company called Artisan Software Tools as their gfx artist, but have also been given the job of looking after their website too.

A recent merger saw Artisan merge with Aonix and Extessy to form Atego. The powers that be have chosen to keep the Artisan website, and just merge in stuff from the other two. The Artisan site was developed using EE 1.6.4 and you can see it here: http://www.artisansoftwaretools.com

We have purchased a new EE licence and this will be used for the http://www.atego.com domain. Currently there are just a handful of static pages on there that mimic the Artisan website and redirect to various pages. This is all with our existing host provider (UH Hosting).

When the new site is ready to go live, we will be going with a new host provider (InMotion). I am currently trying to develop the site on a temporary domain:
http://vps5024.inmotionhosting.com/~ategoc5/

Obviously until this goes live it needs to remain secure, and so I have asked for a username/password to be used. I can provide this via pm should it be required.

Anyway, sorry for the background - but I’m new to EE, PHP, MySQL and I only really have basic web skills - so just getting it all straight in my head.

Right… the problems *deep breath*

I was going to take a backup of the existing Artisan site using the cPanel, but I got some errors (forget what now) regarding the archived file. Having googled the error, it was something to do with there being issues when the archive is over 2GB, and so I decided I would just FTP everything down to my PC, and then FTP it all up to the InMotion site. After this I did use the cPanel to backup the database, and used Restore on InMotion’s cPanel to get it on there.

I tried to follow the KB article How do I move EE to another server? to the best of my abilities. I believe all the permissions were correct. Likewise, I believe I got all the db connection info correct too - but this is around about the time I started getting a little lost.

So when I came to fire up the homepage, I got some server errors, and the same goes for when I tried to access the EE control panel. At this point I had to call over someone from the development team who had some PHP/MySQL knowledge and after lots of trial and error investigation, we got a little further.

I can’t remember everything he did, as most of it went over my head (and his) - but I’ll try and list some of the things we had to do:

The one thing we had to do, which I don’t recall reading about anywhere - was going into the exp_sites section of the database and searching for all references to the original Artisan domain name and replacing it with the temporary InMotion URL (something I assume I will have to redo for when we swap over to Atego.com) as well as update these precursor numbers that reflect the string length.

After doing this we got to see a bit more - namely a homepage that has no css styling and seems to be missing a lot of information. We also got the control panel login screen to appear, albeit with no default styles. At first entering my existing username and password got us nowhere, but after more investigations - including some of the stuff below - we got so I could log into the CP (no styling).

We added [E_All] to all the display_errors found in Php.ini and Index.php (root and system versions).

In the config.sys file we changed the admin_session_type to “S”, as well updated the db_username, db_name and cp_url entries.

In the Path.php file we changed the base_url entry.

So after doing all this, and possibly a few things I’ve missed out (mainly because lots of stuff we tried failed and I lost track), the control panel works - with the correct default EE styling.

However, the homepage remains unchanged with no styling or information.

If I go back into the CP and click on Edit, and click on Live View for any of the pages there, I get:

404 Not Found
The server can not find the requested page:

vps5024.inmotionhosting.com/~ategoc5/in-the-news/1031/ (port 80)
Please forward this error screen to vps5024.inmotionhosting.com’s WebMaster.

Also, if I click on the Templates tab, and select the template for the Product’s page - it’s wrong! I have the existing Artisan CP open in another window so I can compare, and the two product templates are different. In fact, having checked a bunch of the template index.php files, they are all referencing the same file? On the existing Artisan site they are all different? What has gone wrong here? I had this problem about a month ago when I was using my office PC as the dev machine whilst I was waiting for the InMotion site to get purchased. I had hoped it was just something I’d done wrong that wouldn’t be replicated - I guess I was wrong. At the time I just copy and pasted the code from the existing Artisan template to the Atego dev one, but that can’t be right - I don’t believe for one minute that’s what is expected to be done, and so I’ve clearly broken something or done something majorly wrong along the road.

I hope you can help?

Below is some info you might need:

The existing site was developed with EE 1.6.4

We have purchased the latest version of EE, but given all the problems I’ve had so far, I don’t want to upgrade it and break everything else until what we had is fixed hehe.

This is from the InMotion phpMyAdmin page:

Server: Localhost via UNIX socket
Server version: 5.0.89-community
Protocol version: 10
User: ategoc5@localhost
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

Web server
MySQL client version: 4.1.22

phpMyAdmin
Version information: 3.2.4

Sorry - a lot of information, and probably a tad disjointed. I’m not sure what else you need to know to help me? (be kind)

Cheers, Jay

Hi Jay, and welcome to the forums.

Given the above information it’s difficult to ascertain what state your site is in. One thing to note is that you should never manually modify the database - some configuration options, including some URLs, are stored as serialized arrays and these arrays can break if you haven’t also updated the length of a URL.

My suggestion would be to roll back the files and database to the backup straight from the live site, and let’s get that up and running on the temporary domain. If you encounter errors, stop and post those here. An alternative is to do a fresh install of EE 1.6.9 on your temporary domain and build it out like the old site. More time consuming, but if you’re going to be managing the site, that route might pay dividends.

Hi Brandon,

Thanks for the reply, and the welcome.

What we did regarding the database was export exp_sites to a csv file and then look for all instances of the original URL and replace it with the temporary domain address. Then we imported it back into the database. When we searched, there were only 6 instances of this, and so where I might have:

s:36:\“http://www.artisansoftwaretools.com/\”;

this was changed to:

s:44:\“http://vps5024.inmotionhosting.com/~ategoc5/\”;

So doing this got us to a state where I was able to access the EE CP. During the normal installation/restoration procedure - would these references in the existing database get updated automatically, allowing me to access the CP without all that? As for the site itself, it is failing to pick up any of the templates, includes, etc and you’re left with a handful of style-free nonsensical links at the top of the screen.

When you say to do a fresh install of EE 1.6.9, are you suggesting I create a whole new site from scratch - because that is not an option, I lack both the expertise and time. I need to use the existing website as my base for now. I don’t mind working through the upgrade path to get it to 1.6.9, but don’t I need to have the 1.6.4 version of the site working first?

For the time being, I have initiated a partial backup of the Home Directory and will do the same for the database once it’s done. I’ll backup the files and the database I have worked on up to this point in case I have to fall back on it.

So once that is done - just install EE 1.6.9 and look to restore the old site and database around it?

What we did regarding the database was export exp_sites to a csv file and then look for all instances of the original URL and replace it with the temporary domain address.

You must not do this. As Brandon said you will damage your serialzed array that way and the site won’t function. Please roll back to the original db dump.

Then take a look at these articles.

I don’t mind working through the upgrade path to get it to 1.6.9, but don’t I need to have the 1.6.4 version of the site working first?

No, you can install the 1.6.9 files, import the db and then run the upgrade. The only thing the upgrade will do is change the db structure (slightly).