Question Upgrade Nightmare

I am embarassed to say that I didnt pay attention to the error message that I got on my home page after the install, I guess I just pressed the panic button. Anyway, there was in fact an error message and nothing else, no other page on my site opened. Still cant wait to play with the new version.

I'm sure we all have tales of software installations that went horribly wrong. You may remember the famous words from the story Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: "Don't Panic". Perhaps that's cold comfort to you now, in your present circumstances.

I assume that you have a working system. Can you help "fill in the blanks", please? What version of Kunena are you now using - the one that works, that is. What version of Joomla are you using? Does your site meet the technical requirements to install K 1.6 (the "Read Me" contains that information).

Make sure you have a reliable backup of your website.

Perform the installation again. Take note of any error messages that you get when you run the upgrade and let us know what happened. Thank you.

I agree with you. I hate feature "Kunena notice" in K1.6 stable. I think it useless

The upgrade does a check for system requiremnts and it said everything was good and that I just needed to upgrade to the newest joomla and thats 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:

One this I thought I read somewhere is that I should disable all Kunena modules, I think I am running the latest forum post (on eevery page of site)and login module also on a bunch of places on the site. I didnt do that, could that be the culprit?

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.