Hi guys

To be honest, I did not know where to post this question but I though it might be right here.

I'm looking for help to upgrade my really, really old xoops installation to move to the latest version.


First of all some background to my project:
I am the owner of http://www.ocaholic.ch We write reviews about hardware components as well as smartphones and tablets, ... on a daily basis and I do make a living. The reviews are published in four languages, which are English, German, French and Italian.

Personally I would like to upgrade the installed version that the URL's to all reviews and news do not change. The reason for that is, there are thousands of backlinks to ocaholic from other websites around the globe and also the google rank of ocaholic is very good. So I guess you guys can understand that I don't want to kill 8 years of SEO optimization work.

So, why am I posting here?
I'm looking for help to do the upgrade. May this be a guide to do it on my own or somebody who might actually do the upgrade for me. I really hope you guys can help me!

At this point a list of all modules installed:
News 1.55
Impressum 2.2
News 2 1.1
Optimize 2.14
Xoops Care 1.2
Smartsection 2.14
Xcgallery 2.03
SmartLanguage 1
Happy Linux Framework 1.5
SmartPartner 1.4
WF-Downloads 1.4
SmartObject Framework 0.8
SartFAQ 1.08
WebLinks 1.95
CBB 3.08
Addresses 1.5
Members 1
XHLD 3.08
Web Digets 2.01
Polls 1

Now I'm really hoping to read from you guys!

Together with updating XOOPS, you will need to update several of the modules, but with exception of few, most of them have new versions, which are tested and working fine with XOOPS 2.5.5.

As always, the best way is to copy your Website to another location (or to your local PC), do the conversion there by making sure that everything works, and once tested and confirmed, then going live with it.

Thanks for your answer Mamba.

The most important modules are SmartSection, News, xcgallery, Weblinks and WF-Downloads.

What I've done so far is, that I've setup a Xoops 2.5.4 installation which can be found here: http://www.ocaholic.ch/htdocs/

The only module I really struggled with was SmartSection. The admin template got messed up completely. Apart from that everything else is working fine. Since I've not been able to get SmartSection running correctly, I switched to Publisher regarding the new installation. Now that I've seen Publisher I would like to have this one when it comes to the final/updated version (I guess I don't have to explain why). The only problem I have now is that all the links to our reviews are going to be different. When I do the import from SmartSection to Publisher, the latter doesn't set the same "itemid" like there was in SmartSection, which in the end renders all the backlinks useless.
If there was a possibility to have Publisher set the same itemid's like SmartSection did, then the move to Publisher wouldn't be an issue.

It kind of seems like I should be able to do the upgrades myself. But what do you think would be the better choice. Since I've already created a new installation in another directory, which is quite close to completion would you rather move that installation to directory which is now live or would you really update the 2.0.16 installation?

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I would take the first option. In that way you get a clean install without orphaned files or unpredictable old features. Take for instance the template system which is totally rebuild, I still experience some template issues with an updated site...

I'm not really a publisher expert, maybe someone else can help you with that!

Quote:
Yes, it's possible. I did it for a client early this year, and everything worked just fine.

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I mean, I know that I can change the entries in the DB one by another, but that's quite a pain

Of course it would be pain!
You do it by importing the DB into Publisher

before or once you successful upgrade your xoops

i think you should move your xoops file in public_html root

so user is redirect to
http://www.ocaholic.ch/

and not
http://www.ocaholic.ch/xoops/html/ or http://www.ocaholic.ch/htdocs/

just my 2 cents

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He wants to preserve links to his site, so I am afraid he has to make this mistake again

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This is the easiest task of this upgrade! just a copy paste and change the mainfile will do the job.

@reWARder:

I upgrade some multilanguage websites. I recommend you to uninstall and remove smartlanguage completely and change it with Xlanguage.