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I am so entirely sick of Ellis Lab lack of care or attention to user support.

If such a ridiculously obvious and stupid bug made it through your *testing*,  which you clearly aren’t doing properly before releases,  the LEAST you can do is fix these damn bugs in the ExpressionEngine Download,  so that new users don’t encounter upgrade errors.

I have been with EL and EE for 6 years,  have done hundreds of upgrades,  and I have YET to have an EE upgrade without PHP errors.  It is getting much worse,  and I imagine this lack of care to detail is why…

I second the motion! There is absolutely no excuse for many of these errors which should have been caught prior to release.

Until then, maybe Ellis Lab could setup a specific forum category for “Installation & Upgrade Issues” making it easier for both user to handle issues and forum Monitors to better help them.

Such anger and hostility!
:(
Hopefully, Leslie Camacho or a HigherUp will pop their head in here.

OrganizedFellow,  believe me,  this comes after a long,  long,  history of patient and thoughtful emails / posts / tweets over the years.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I’ve done hundreds of upgrades over several sites,  with a 100% failure rate.  Not one upgrade has ever completed without errors,  followed by hours or days of troubleshooting obscure new bugs or required template changes due to arbitrary and undocumented changes to core code.

Bugs like this being in the current download is unacceptable,  but par for the course.  And venting here seems to be the only touch of relief.  If there’s enough negative feedback,  perhaps something will change.  However I’m afraid from experience that the Ellis Lab response will likely be:

- do nothing,  say nothing
- customer outrage grows here and on twitter
- an influential member of the community writes a venting blog post
- Ellis Lab appoints a ‘listening to customers Czar’
- ‘Czar’ gathers feedback with brand new tool
- Czar provides fortune cookie wisdom responses via twitter
- Announcement of new internal Developer workflow tool,  using the latest trendy dev tool / philosophy
- Silence
- latest upgrade crashes during install due to known bugs

I use EE because it is still the most flexible and powerful platform,  but I am looking and trying other options much more than I used to,  and it makes me sad and frustrated. 

I’m just starting to feel like Charlie Brown to Lucy’s promise of not pulling away the football at the last minute… Good grief.

Ira

(updated post title to soften it a bit)

I kinda understand your frustration.
While I haven’t performed as many upgrades as you have, I may soon join the ranks.

An old client of mine still runs 1.6.7, and wants to know why something broke.
She doesn’t want to upgrade, just wants it fixed, lol.
Oh what a tangled mess.

OH AND SHE’S HOSTED ON GODADDY!
😊
Happy Monday amigo! Hope your week is better than mine!

Hey ira42,

No need to soften your frustration. Sometimes we all need to vent, and I completely understand. Serious bugs can be a complete joy-killer and can certainly affect your business. That’s not cool, and I get that. To be honest, though, your last response sort of backed us into a corner. Your frustration implies that you want some things to change, but then it seemed like you were already unsatisfied with what you imagined our response would be.

So instead, let me respond with a question. What could I do to delight you here?

Totally second Ira here.

I have done 10+ EE upgrades for clients, but not a single one went without php errors. Upgrading EE is the most painful and uncertain process for me. Hope a paid product like EE can introduce a 1-click update process like wordpress.

... Hope a paid product like EE can introduce a 1-click update process like wordpress.

WordPress is hopelessly simple though. It’s a comparison of two entirely different things.

However you and ira42 are right, upgrading and updating our sites should be simpler than they currently are.

My biggest gripe is transitioning from development to a live server environment.
There shouldn’t be as many hacks/tricks/tips/addons that make it easier.
I’d love to just make the changes in config.php & database.php and now worry about breaking something.

Kevin, you ask:

“What could I do to delight you here?”

My answer would be:

1) Explain in detail how and why this bug made it through your testing process.

2) Change your testing process so that this bug would not make it through again.

You can’t create bug-free software; but you can create a testing and rollout process that ensures that certain types of bugs will not occur.

TTFN
Travis

Am I the only one not to have major problems upgrading? I’ve only ever had a problem once in the early days of EE2 but since then upgrades go without any hassle at all.

Am I the only one not to have major problems upgrading? I’ve only ever had a problem once in the early days of EE2 but since then upgrades go without any hassle at all.

Thank you for responding.  One of the things about discussion forums and reviews of products is that, generally, the only people who are active in these discussions are those that are either “extremely satisfied” or “extremely dissatisfied”.

I personally have never experienced a failure of an upgrade - **BUT** I have never upgraded when recommended by the EE/Ellislab team.  I always let the bugs reveal themselves in the forums and wait until the dust settles… apply the patches, then upgrade.

This sucks, as a customer, when I (personally) hope for better communication and a more thorough testing process.

I personally find the upgrade process tedious and after having upgraded dozens of sites, have only experienced one upgrade failure. That failure was also my fault for doing the upgrade process from memory rather than looking at the docs - not a particularly smart move with a 4 site MSM install, but there you go. In the end I did get it working.

The upgrade process does need to be streamlined and not just the bugs that users encounter, but the whole process. There’s been a move towards this with having third party add-ons moved outside of system. But this is an incomplete move as third party themes are still inside system so it’s really not a very elegant approach. Personally I would prefer to see third party addons and themes outside of system inside their own folder like this

-httpdocs
—third_party
—-themes
—-addons

Additionally a little known fact is that EE, MSM & The Discussion Module need to be upgraded lockstep. I would like to see the documentation for each of these let you know which versions are compatible with each other. Honestly having to upgrade an install of EE just because I want to add an additional site license to MSM is a big PITA.

Just my two cents.

I personally have never experienced a failure of an upgrade - **BUT** I have never upgraded when recommended by the EE/Ellislab team.  I always let the bugs reveal themselves in the forums and wait until the dust settles… apply the patches, then upgrade.

EL’s recommendation is to always run the latest version of EE. However, as we’ve seen, that can be problematic until the bugs are worked out. EL is not keen about revealing specific security vulnerabilities (and therefor fixes you can apply yourself) so it’s necessary to upgrade if you want to be secure.

This creates a catch-22: upgrade ASAP and deal with bugs or wait long enough for bugs to get worked out and remain open to potential hacks (which can make you liable for not upgrading a client who then gets hacked while you knew there was a patch available). What to do?

In my opinion, the answer involves two parts:
1. Adopt an open security disclosure policy and tell people how to patch their EE installations on their own, then push out a secure version ASAP.

2. More thorough bug testing before each release.

Normally I wait at least 3 weeks to upgrade, but there was a bug in 2.5 that was affecting a client critically (pagination on the Edit page wasn’t working), and I was told by EllisLab support that to solve it, I needed to upgrade to 2.5.1 (i.e. there was no simple code fix for this problem).

I think that patching, as opposed to upgrading, leads to more difficult support issues for yourself, and also to EllisLab, because it fractures the possible versions you could be running. Anything that makes EE more difficult for EL to support, I think we should avoid 😊

The idea, though, of having security-only upgrade releases—no other bug fixes—that makes some sense.

2.5—new release.
2.5.1—any security issues
2.5.2—2.5.1 plus any bug fixes and new features like IPv6. If there’s no 2.5.1, just go straight to 2.5.2.
2.5.3—any security issue
2.5.4—2.5.3 plus any security issues

Apple and Microsoft do this by having monthly security updates, separate from the regular OS updates.  To be fair, EL rarely has a security issue in EE—I’m thankful for that often.

Or, should there be beta releases? I’d be much less upset if a beta release (2.5.1, say) was flawed but 2.5.2 was more solid and I knew I could upgrade to it right after it was released.

However, the original post raises the critical issue: why do upgrades seems to run into issues so often, and why does the testing of new releases seem to be so flawed? What can be done that hasn’t been promised and tried before?

@Sean C. Smith: If you put add-ons and themes in the same “third-party” directory, you’d lose the ability to put the PHP code outside the document root—and it wouldn’t be a good idea to make the add-ons folder be in a place that someone viewing source for your themes directory path would be able to guess. Though it would be more convenient, yep.

TTFN
Travis