Upgrading b2Evo from 1.9x to 2.4x

by cw

Just been through the painful process of upgrading the blog engine as the title says. The skins are much easier to work with, but need to be redone. The transfer over of settings is less pleasant.

How we accomplished it: Using some spare space on your webserver, install B2evo version 2.40RC2 or later, into a new, fresh database. Check out how things work, how they are different in the skins and backend. Rebuild your custom skin in the new version, without bothering to add posts, just using the demo data. You are best not adding the new widgets just yet, but getting familiar with what they allow you to do.If you don't take this advice, and end up doing a lot of work in the widget area, then you will need to get familiar with hacking MySQL data to introduce the new data to your upgraded blog.

Hint: 21 3 Menu 4 core menu_link a:1:{s:9:"link_type";s:5:"login";}

The second number (field) is the blog number, which will be different to the old/upgraded blog.

Once you have finished perfecting this backup your old installation, both skins, files if customized, and mysql database(you may need your host's help to do this). Backup the database that's new. Backup the new skin(s) you have just made. Extract the b2evo file. Take the files from the blogs directory thus created (b2evolution/blogs/etc.) and put them into the root of your old b2evo system. Then fire up you firefox, and head to the normal site for your blog, adding admin.php to the end of it, eg http://mysite.com/admin.php

Then it should take you through the automated process of upgrading the database. Read carefully, and answer the questions wisely.

When finished test the blogs thoroughly - archives, categories, comments, etc.

We encountered a number of gotchas. The above stuff didn't work at all, so in the new backend "manage" for the blogs, logging in as admin, go to the URLs field for each blog, and choose the following: Use-param for everything except except Date-archive, which is "use extra path".

Also, copy the index.php and stub.php out of the new system into the directories of your old system if you have them separated as blogs for domain name resolution purposes. Modify the inserted files. The files both have a line looking like this: require_once __FILE__.'/conf/_config.php'; change it to be require_once '../conf/_config.php';

Change any blog-numbering in the stub file , eg $blog=5

I also add the following to my index.php, right after the closing ?>

<html>

<head>

<title>CombatWombat Speaks</title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

<link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://combatwombat.7doves.com/favicon.ico">

</link></meta></head>

<body>re></body></html>

That ensures that my Wombat favicon is used.

EDIT---

The issue with URLs being handled differently came down to the .htaccess file. Ensure you have just one for your blog, not added extras in each subdirectory.

Add the following to the end of your file:

# send all others to the core

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule .* /index.php [L]

#

Thanks to Yabba for this.