Question Upgrade Nightmare

Yes - you have to turn off all old 3rd party modules and plugins.

The 3rd party developed modules did not use any version check and many of them break when you install a new version of Kunena - or for the same matter - when you uninstall Kunena.

Check our downloads area for our versions of most modules and plugins - they perform the proper checks and will run with Kunena 1.6 out of the box.

FYI The apache error log will tell you exactly what module or plugin crashed.

joey2509 wrote: The upgrade does a check for system requirements and it said everything was good and that I just needed to upgrade to the newest Joomla and that's what I did so I was running all I needed to run. I really hate to go through this again but I guess I will have to :blush:

As fxstein wrote, and as I and others have written earlier in this topic, users can avoid the "upgrade nightmare" scenario by spending 10 minutes reading the installation notes ( Kunena 1.6.0 Read Me ) before they start the upgrade.

We're not trying to make joey2509 feel any worse, nor "rub salt into the wounds" or say "I told you so"; we're very sympathetic to this all-too-common situation. Rather we're trying to get an important message across to help other people not make the same mistakes. In fact, for this reason, I think this topic should be make sticky so that people will read the messages about the need to take precautions before they upgrade from an older version of Kunena to K 1.6.

Although the K 1.6 installation procedure has a lot of built-in integrity checks (and, in my opinion, is such an improvement that it sets a new standard - a standard against which other software will now have to be measured) there are some things that it cannot do. No software upgrade procedure is totally bullet-proof. There are always important preparations that people need to take before they upgrade:

1. Make sure that you know how the installation procedure works: read the installation notes


2. Test the installation procedure first, not on your production site but on a copy of your production site, so that you know what to expect; you may find that the test shows that you have a lot more work to do instead of "just upgrading" Kunena. You may need to reconsider using certain features that you've been running for several years; you may find that this is a good opportunity to seriously reconsider whether certain features of your website are even worth retaining ... maybe it's a good time to change or redesign your website?


3. Make sure that you have a reliable backup of your website.


4. Make sure all other Joomla extensions on your site, that may interact with K 1.6, are upgraded to the correct minimum versions (e.g. JomSocial, Community Builder, uddeIM), etc.)


5. Search through these forums to read about problems and solutions that people have discovered with other extensions (e.g. sh404SEF, AlphaUserPoints, RocketTheme templates, etc)


6. Do not try to use old add-ons for earlier versions of Kunena; these need to be disabled and uninstalled.
   
   

Ok, so far so good, I think. I got the install to work with a couple things to work out. I cannot see all the buttons that are on top of forum i.e. my posts, recent topics etc...Is that something I have to set up in the admin?

This could be my imagination but it now appears that my header graphic on my site is not a bit distorted looking after the upgrade....possible?
www.kayakfishingmagazine.net

joey2509 wrote: I cannot see all the buttons that are on top of forum i.e. my posts, recent topics etc. Is that something I have to set up in the admin?

The buttons, as you call them, are collectively known as the Kunena Menu; sometimes people it the "top menu" or the "top horizontal menu" or even the "navigation menu". Whatever you refer to it as, the menu is normally set up for you as long as you (a) did not have major dramas with the installation procedure in the first place - which you did - and (b) you have a fairly "standard" mod_mainmenu menu module that's being used. Most sites use a mod_mainmenu but many sites don't.

Anyway, there are lots of ways to produce the menu. See Troubleshooting Kunena Menu in the Wiki.

I don't know anything about whether the header graphic on your website is displayed correctly or not. Whatever the case, it is displayed consistently on every page and therefore this has nothing to do with the installation of Kunena.

Now that we have successfully dealt with overcoming your "upgrade nightmare" and you now have K 1.6 installed (even though you are still wrestling with your Kunena menu problems) I think this topic has served its purpose as an illustration of the precautions that users need to make before upgrading Kunena and as a demonstration of the systematic approach that people should take whenever they plan to upgrade any software - Kunena, Joomla or otherwise.