To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade
Next time I think I will go with NOT!!!! On the PTA website we ran a CMS program called Postnuke, now known as Zikula. It is a great option for designing/maintaining websites. I’ve used it for years. In the past year the powers that be decided to do a major overhaul of Postnuke, and re-brand it Zikula. Ok, I was fine with that. But, with the introduction of Zikula, they will no longer support Postnuke. Thus, every Postnuke user was urged to upgrade. Ok, I was fine with that. I always prefer to run the latest version of any software, I mean, an upgrade must mean it is better right? Probably true. The problem is in the upgrade process. I’ve done many upgrades on various programs in the past, PhotoPost, Vbulletin, PHPbb, WordPress, and many many others. Usually, an upgrade is a smooth process. But, occasionally – it turns into a nightmare. I was afraid a nightmare occurring at cespta.org during the school year when we need the site to be functional for our members. So, I figured I would wait until the summer for the upgrade.
What better week than the the one when my kids are staying with the grandparents? If something went wrong, I figured I could stay up til all hours to fix it and not be bombarded with requests for cereal at 7:00am.
So, this is what happened. The nightmare I envisioned occurred. I started by making a backup of the database which everyone knows is the first step to any upgrade. Ok cool, that worked – so if all else failed I could just restore the site and keep on chugging away with the outdated, obsolete Postnuke version. Then I proceeded to the upgrade part – and that is where it all fell apart. I can’t begin to explain what happened, basically the site just broke – the customer support dudes did try to help. I spoke to several of them within the 10 hour period from when I started the process around 5:00, to when I gave up and fell into bed close to 3:00. The next morning, (actually closer to afternoon) I got up to start hacking away at it again. After many more hours of fruitless attempts to either go ahead with the upgrade, or just put it back the way it was, I found that I could do neither. I admitted defeat and decided to just re-install a fresh version of zikula and re-build the site from scratch. Then I left for Date Night with my hubby.
Today, I had another thought – maybe I could change the records that hold the data in the tables to read with the proper prefix of zk instead of pn. If this works I declare myself to be a genius! If it does not work, I declare myself to be mentally challenged in the world of databases and just move on with the re-building process.
July 14 2009 02:17 pm | Life at the Anderson's