Preparations for Upgrade
Turn Site Off
Before starting the XOOPS upgrade proccess, you should set the "Turn your site off?" item to Yes in the Preferences -> System Options -> General Settings page in the Administration Menu.
This keeps users from encountering a broken site during the upgrade. It also keeps contention for resources to a minimum to ensure a smoother upgrade.
Instead of errors and a broken site, your visitors will see something like this:
Backup
It is a good idea to use the XOOPS administration Maintenance section to Clean cache folder for all caches before making a full backup of your site files. With the site off, using the Empty the sessions table is also recommended so that if a restore is needed, the stale sessions will not be part of it.
Files
The file backup can be made with FTP, copying all files to your local machine. If you have direct shell access to the server, it can be much faster to make a copy (or an archive copy) there.
Database
For making a database backup, you can use the built in functions in the XOOPS administration Maintenance section. You can also use the Export functions in phpMyAdmin, if available. If you have shell access, you can use the mysql command to dump your database.
Being fluent in backing up, and restoring your database is an important webmaster skill. There are many online resources that you can use to learn more about these operations as appropriate to your installation, such as http://webcheatsheet.com/sql/mysql_backup_restore.php
Copy New Files to the Site
Copying the new files to your site is virtually identical to the Preparations step during installation. You should copy the xoops_data and xoops_lib directories to wherever these were relocated during the install. Then, copy the rest of the contents of the distribution's htdocs directory (with a few exceptions covered in the next section) over the existing files and directories in your web root.
Copy the entire upgrade directory from the distribution to your web root, creating an upgrade directory there.
Things You Might Not Want To Copy Over
You should not recopy the install directory into a working XOOPS system. Leaving the install folder in your XOOPS installation exposes your system to potential security issues. The installer randomly renames it, but you should delete it and make sure you don't copy in another one.
There are some files you may have editied to customize your site, and you will want to preserve those. Here is a list of common customizations.
xoops_data/configs/xoopsconfig.php if it has been changed since the site was installed
any directories in themes if customized for your site. In this case you may want to compare files to identify useful updates.
any file in class/captcha/ starting with "config" if it has been changed since the site was installed
any customizations in class/textsanitizer
any customizations in class/xoopseditor
If you realize after the upgrade that something was accidentally overwritten, don't panic -- that is why you started with a full backup. (You did make a backup, right?)
Check mainfile.php
Old versions of XOOPS (i.e. 2.3) required some manual changes to be made in mainfile.php to enable the Protector module. In your web root you should have a file named mainfile.php. Open that file in your editor and look for these lines:
and
Remove these lines if you find them, and save the file before continuing.
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