Last week I try to upgrade over test enviroment one website with geeklog 1.2.5... I obtain tons of notes written in papers, advices, warnings, etc.
Of course, when I try to do it again over production website, nothing works...
Now I working over a new way of upgrade, this "clean" upgrade means to install new fresh database with another name, and then, try to move all the content (stories, users, etc) from old database to new database using sql sentences (or, if I can automate this, from a bunch of phps).
Of course, it's very hard between some versions (security system change from 1.2 to 1.3) but maybe can get a more clean upgrade.
What is your opinion about that?

Upgrades have been a major thorn in the side for us. It's hard to make the installation go flawlessly for both windows and *nix users. The biggest issue with windows is actually a non-issue now that I have it all figured out. I have done a number of windows installations of late and here are the key sticking points:

1) all paths must use '/' and not '\'. For example:
Bad: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\geeklog
Good: C:/inetpub/wwwroot/geeklog

2) Remove all trailing whitespace after the '?>' in all the Geeklog files. I can't say why this is such a problem on windows

Now, the other issue with installations is with hosted environments. The biggest problem with hosted environments is a) the location of the public_html directory b) file/directory permissions and c) the use of /admin (that is reserved by some ISP's for their own administration).

My thoughts for the upgrades moving forward are this:

1) separate file set-up from database setup. I know many of you like the web-based installer but, honestly, it's been more work than it is worth. With that said, we may go back to manual file setup and configuration. This basically means you would edit config.php, lib-database.php, lib-common.php yourself

2) No matter what, the database setup and be done via the web. Once we have the database connection parameters, we can do all our structure updates and data inserts. If you are wondering why do this in a PHP file instead of a SQL file, it is because of the way security is implemented. We need to be able to store certain values during the database setup for later use and it is much simpler to do in PHP code.

Those are just my initial thoughts on installing Geeklog. I have learned a lot from my past mistakes and hope to make th e installations and upgrades with Geeklog easy to follow and as painless as possible regardless of your hosting situation.

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The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

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The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.