Hello,

A client had a WordPress site which we moved onto one of our servers by copying all the files and using a MySQL dump we had from their previous IT people. We didn’t expect it to work straight away, and it didn’t, but we got over the obvious issues, and things started to become visible.

There have always been a lot of issues, though; it seems, for instance, that the db dump we were given originally was pretty corrupt. The whole thing is a pig, and we’ve decided to make sure all the code is as up-to-date as possible in order to eliminate any problems there. We’ve upgraded WordPress itself to 3.4.1, and BuddyPress at the moment is at 1.2.8.

Obviously we need to upgrade BuddyPress. The instructions at http://codex.buddypress.org/releases/version-1-6/upgrading-to-1-6/ say explicitly to upgrade first to 1.5 before moving up to 1.6, but it seems as though the automatic upgrade link in the plugins section of wp-admin wants to go straight to 1.6

Is it important to avoid this? If so, how should I go about the interim upgrade to 1.5? I downloaded the files for 1.5.6, but will I have to do anything to the database, or will it be sufficient to copy the new BuddyPress files over the top of their existing counterparts?

I’ve got the whole site backed up – all the files in the web root and a db dump – so it’s not the end of the world if something goes wrong, but I’d far rather avoid the faffing about.

Thanks in anticipation for your help.

Cheers,
Ben

[@modemlooper Moderator 12 years, 3 months ago]

De activate all plugins and then delete the 1.2 BuddyPress folder. Then upload 1.5 and activate and go through upgrade process. If you haven’t edited core BP files you should be ok. The plugins may need a one x one activate test to make sure they work.

[@spuntotheratboy Member 12 years, 3 months ago]

Trouble is, when we de-activate plugins, the entire site goes blank – including the admin pages! At least, it’s happened that way before and it was a MySQL nightmare getting it back to normal. We never managed to work out exactly what plugins were causing it to fail when they were de-activated.

I’ll give it a go, though, if I can’t find any other way round it.

Thanks for your help.

[@mercime Participant 12 years, 3 months ago]

@spuntotheratboy I upgraded an installation from BP 1.2.5 / WP 3.0 but I did it step by step, watching up for WP upgrades as well as the BP compatible upgrades.

The first thing I did before the first upgrade was to change to bp-default theme. Then I deactivated the BP-compatible plugins, then the other WP plugins plus renamed bp-custom.php and renamed the mu-plugins folder, then changed to Twenty Ten theme and deactivated BP.

Version by Major version manual (s/FTP) upgrades of WP and BP per compatibility of both and stopping to check the site once in a while to check if BP components are working as expected. For reference re compatibility of WP/BP versions, check out https://codex.buddypress.org/releases/

[@stwc Participant 12 years, 3 months ago]

Crikey. I just did this yesterday, and just FTP-dropped BP 1.5 on top of 1.2.x, upgraded with the wizard thing in the backend, then used the plugins upgrade tool to get to 1.6. With no working search here in the forum and so many missing pages in the codex, I gave up trying to find canonical directions and just went for it. Seemed to work OK. I guess I was lucky.

Some of my custom functions.php code is broken, but I knew that would happen.

[@djpaul Keymaster 12 years, 3 months ago]

You ought to be able to upgrade from recent 1.2.x versions up to 1.6.x without problem. Probably counts as a bug if it’s not possible. As some others have said, it’s normally theme or plugin compatibility that you have to watch out for. If you’ve got a staging or test environment, try on there and see what happens

[@spuntotheratboy Member 12 years, 3 months ago]

Thanks everyone! I don’t have a convenient test environment available, but I have backed up the entire database and all the files, so I think I’ll cross my fingers and try stwc’s method, as the easiest – assuming it works!

If it doesn’t then I’ll revert and we’ll try a different approach. Ultimately we’re planning to move all the functionality off the WordPress installation and onto our own system anyway, so there’s a limit to the amount of time I want to put into making it work properly.

Thanks again everyone, I’ll report back!

[@spuntotheratboy Member 12 years, 3 months ago]

Well… mixed results. Replacing the 1.2.8 files with those from 1.5.6 blanked everything, including wp-admin. I tried putting them both in the plugins directory, de-activated 1.2.8, then tried to activate 1.5.6 but it wouldn’t activate.

So essentially the upgrade so far has been a failure. On the other hand it is, as I mentioned, a temporary measure so that isn’t a catastrophe. In the process, though, I discovered that the files we’d been sent originally had been on a mac at some point, and the file system was littered [sic] with mac resource forks. I used ‘find’ to delete those, and we seem to be in a much, much better state than previously! Apparently WordPress tries to load and execute the resource forks where they’re present.

There are still egregious problems with the site, but I’m inclined to think that most of them are to do with the corruption in the db data we were given initially, e.g. existing comments seem to have become disassociated from their original posts, whereas new comments are working properly.

Thanks very much, everyone, for your help. I’m not marking this as resolved since my original problem hasn’t been solved, but I think we’re probably going to leave BuddyPress alone for the moment. WordPress is great when it works, but I’ve found it pretty opaque to debug; thanks again for helping me out!

Cheers,
Ben

[@ryanhellyer Participant 12 years, 3 months ago]

I’m trying to do the exact same thing right now. It has gone smoothly, bar version 1.5 featuring no CSS for the admin bar, then on upgrading to 1.6 the admin bar CSS was fixed, but all the menu items in the admin bar disappeared.

Any ideas on how to get the BuddyPress bar menu items back?

I chose to use the new admin bar menu instead of the older one, so perhaps I could go back to that to fix it? It seems like moving to the regular WordPress one would be best though.