[SOLVED] Big upgrade - question on best way to go about it

[WebbyMom]

I just upgraded one site from 1.2.3 to 1.5.2. I know, I should have kept up with it, my bad.

Quite a few things have gone bottom up, most of which I can either work around or don't affect me personally. There are two other ladies that update this site, however (I'm mostly their techy and web designer), and they are having troubles. One of them in particular as I mentioned in another thread, is having IE crash completely when she does a certain thing.

It seems the cms_selflink WYSIWYG button is working completely differently between these two versions and now gives me utter crap for output. I had to go and completely re-set all my TinyMCE stuff so it would work again. And various other small things have happened, but we can deal with most of them.

So my question here is, what would be the best way to upgrade? (Yes, I backed everything up first.). I considered going step-by-step through the diff and new version files, but that seemed illogical after reading a post here that mentioned that each new version will upgrade all old ones (or some wording to that effect).

Now I'm wondering if I should have maybe started at the minimum with Ver. 1.3 and tested, then gone on to the next one, tested, etc.

Is there any point to that? Or was I right to do what I did? I think as long as we can fix the IE crashing problem, we could work without the cms_selflink button and a couple of other inconveniences we can work around. But at this point, my ladies are begging me to go back to the old version - which I keep reading would be a virtual sin to do. And I'm hosting this site, so it's not like I want to risk being hacked, which is why I decided to do the upgrade.

Any advice on upgrading procedure would be very awesome.

[Woof]

Hi WebbyMom,
Just did an upgrade for a friend from 1.2.5 to the latest 1.5.2
I followed the instructions and I had no problems. Content and template are just the way it was before the upgrade.

I urge you to really upgrade: the reasons I did the upgrade for my friend: the website was hacked (mysterious files such as copper.php and others were somehow inserted into the TinyMCE folder inside the modules). And while searching on that hack, I realized an other WYSIWYG editor was hacked too.
On my friend's website there was also a Coppermine Photo Gallery that was also corrupted/hacked and had to update to the latest version (Feb. 4, 2009). In fact, not only the Coppermine Gallery was hacked, but all her php files in all her website/hosting space that had some base64 code at the top.

Which was the first hack... the old version of CMS or Coppermine? IT DOES NOT MATTER as both programs were not up-to-date.

A lesson learned for my friend and a whole morning searching to help.

Woof

[WebbyMom]

Believe me, Woof, I want to upgrade. However, I think we've determined that it's due to some kind of Vista-IE7 glitch on my friend's computer. And she's not a techy at all, so forget her trying to figure out her system errors. To top it off, even if I could help her with that, she lives in Pennsylvania and I'm in British Columbia. She's the main updater for the site, and as it stands, she can't do anything on it. She also just gets HTML output on the news page instead of the WYSIWYG, but gets the WYSIWYG on the page editing pages.   

We're kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place here. And it's not something I could have predicted, either, as I'm on XP and everything works tickety-boo for me. *sigh* (Mostly everything - for some silly reason, TinyMCE is not reading my pre-defined styles for "hr" anymore and it doesn't even show up in the editing box, only in the final saved page. It's stuff like that that is merely driving us all flipping nuts... It's the crashing browser that's forcing us backwards, however.)

Until I can find a way around this, I have to go back. I'm hoping it's temporary. 

[WebbyMom]

As it turns out, due to a horrible mistake that was completely my fault, we can't un-upgrade as the backup files were borked.

What do you know, she downloaded FF, tested it out, and it updates the site just fine for her. Yay FF!!!!

So we're not going back, I'm happy, and I'll keep on the upgrade path from here.

Thanks for your comments, Woof. I'll mark this as solved, but I'll be posting a couple of new questions for the few things we're having trouble it I bet.

[shlashdot]

I just did my site from 1.2.3 to 1.5.2 following every version and subversion.  I did everything with wget and tar since ftp is hopeless on satellite internet.  Backed up every step.  Seemed to work although I haven't tested exhaustively.  But I won't let it slide again that's for sure.