New here
Hello,
while thinking on upgrading the old SMF codebase which is not fully functional anymore i stumbled across ElkArte.
Before i start any migration attempt a few questions:
The code base is a somewhat hacked SMF 1.1.16 with the Dilbert Theme.
Forum language is German - we need full German localisation.
We have a few thousand users and a 10 year old posting history.
As i like the friendly light brown colors of that Theme: are there any themes which provide similar color schemes?
And now to the more important questions:
the SMF code has been extended to support more than two genders (which are integer numbers on SMFs database level, the range is just extended...) . What about ElkArte? What would happen if i try a migration? Is there any way to retain these additional genders? Would i have to implement this (i debugged that code sequence, so i have some idea what's going on) before i import any SMF database?
In SMF 1.1 and, AFAIK, also 2.0.x the server URL and the path to the installation directory are kept in the database at various places. This make the use of a dev platform difficult - the forum cannot just be moved to a different place / domain without editing the database. i know that it can be done piping the database dump through sed, but i do not like that. How does Elk behave in this respect?
What should i consider on the server - i (need to) use an old debian version with a self compiled old PHP (AFIR some 5.2) in order to be able to run that old code, but i would like to migrate to nginx/fastcgi and a less old version of php. Would ElkArte run on php 5.4.45 which i know is not the latest as well?
Finally: is there and document describing the migration from SMF 1.1.x to ElkArte?
Thanks
Beate
Re: New here
Reply #9 –
To pick this old thread up. Until now i have not upgraded. How stable is the 1.1 (beta?) version of Elk? Usable in production for a "daring" user - which means, the most important basic features should work flawlessly. My old SMF installation also has some glitches....
Is there already a German language pack for 1.1 - again perfection is not necessary?
If i am honest i would prefer to have a shell / sed /awk / emacs / whatever script which works on Database A (dump, backup) and extracts the necessary tables and writes them into an ElkArte database which i can load. That would allow me to configure the new site with an older backup and later on repeat that procedure during the actual migration. Such a script might be easily modified to account for different file system structures and domain names.
(Yes, i admit, i am thinking in an old fashioned way... but i did my 1st steps into IT doing FORTRAN on punched cards...)
Re: New here
Reply #10 –
I will work on the german translation the next days. It should be available soon.
Re: New here
Reply #11 –
Glad to hear of another punch card user, had to use those once or twice back in the days of learning FORTRAN 77
We just added 1.1 RC1 to the github releases, it contains all of the 1.0.10 fixes and should reflect what this site is running. I have not had a chance to install that package to make sure the merge went well (or as well as it could, poor emanuele !)
The biggest "block" to running 1.1 in production could be that 3rd party addons/themes have not been updated to work with it. Some may work fine, others will need some tweaks, others some actual effort to get working.
Would you be updating from ElkArte 1.0 or some SMF version?
Re: New here
Reply #13 –
I also tried to make a copy of my forum editing the database file with rpl command (similar to sed) and I got the same problems that Emanuele wrote above with multiple folders for attachments, so it won't work. We need to use the repair settings file to correct the paths for attachments
Re: New here
Reply #14 –
Weeelll.
If it is just paths and URLs and you know what you are doing enough to use the CLI, write a simple script that takes as input path (base path of the forum) and URL and fixes all the relevant shouldn't be particularly difficult (assuming all the paths are sub.directories of the root of the forum).