CMS Made Simple Forums

Hello,

Forewarning, I'm pretty new to CMS Made Simple. I took over managing a website for a client who was setup with CMSMS but their previous developer never upgraded and they were sitting at 1.11.12.

Anyways, I got them successfully upgraded to 1.12.2. It wasn't exactly fun because the old developer had written a lot of custom code into the index.php and include.php files. Thankfully CMSMS provided diff-file downloads so I could compare and migrate manually.

Anyways, I thought the next step would be to go from 1.12.2 to 2.0 and then work my way through the 2.0 upgrades. But I found out the upgrade is done over PHAR instead of manual where I could use diff.

So, I tried the upgrade and... nothing happened. Well, something did, it created about 19,000 index.html files in every subfolder according to `git status`. But the installer hangs on the section which I assume it should be updating the database. It just sits there, never proceeds and I cannot click on to continue.

I guess that is the history and brings me to a couple of questions.

1. Am I wasting time trying to upgrade from 1.12.2 to 2.0. Can I just work on upgrading to 1.12.2 to the latest (2.2.1 as of this writing).
2. Is it possible to not use the PHAR installer and manually do it somehow?
3. Any ideas why it just hangs on the database update? All logs just stop writing. Nothing in the tables get updated.

Because I am unfamiliar with CMSMS, I thought maybe the 2.0 installer doesn't work anymore? That reminds me, I actually tried setting up a clean install of 1.12.2 to compare against but had the same issue where the installer just hangs on the database setup and never creates any tables. I haven't tried running the 2.2.1 installer, thought I'd ask on here before I waste more of my time playing around.

Anyways, maybe someone can help. If you need more details I can provided as necessary.

** EDIT ** Also, is there a way to stop the installer from creating the index.html files? It messes up my git status which helps me figure out which files I need to run a diff against. And in addition, there is an OpenCart installation sitting in a child folder which it would be nice to not have touched by CMSMS.

Thanks in advance.

I'm sorry but you are not going to like some of my responses to your inquiry.

a: We in no way support hacked installations.
It is just too time consuming, and a huge waste of resources to try to support people that are hacking (or have hacked) the installation. Even if it is not your fault. We will not knowingly answer any questions by members using hacked software or doing funky things like manually editing the database to work around perceived problems.

Please put your site back to a stock installation (do a checksum verification and make sure that all php files validate). And then make sure your site operates properly before upgrading.

b: We only support the last 2 stable releases of CMSMS, currently 2.2 and 2.2.1.
So the dev team is not obliged to help you with 1.x, which has known security vulnerabilities. We provided support for 1.12 for a full calendar year once 2.0 was released that period ended in September 2016.
Though you may post your 1.x questions in one of the community boards (the lounge), it is not an obligation of the dev team to respond to them.

3. The phar installer (or it's expanded version) is the only way to install, upgrade, or freshen CMSMS from 2.0 onwards. This software solves many problems people encountered with the old installer, and adds more functionality that was not possible with the old version. Though it does have tougher host restrictions.

4. I think your database is corrupt, or you do not have the sufficient privileges to perform the upgrade. This is a system level issue and not a CMSMS issue. Particularly if it is happening in multiple versions of the software.

[addendum]
5. Read the changelogs of each and every release (at least the latest in the series) before you upgrade.

You can read the changelogs on the forge, in the phar installer, by checking out the changelog from SVN.... or using the browse code option on the CMS Made Simple core project on the forge.

Thanks for the reply, I understand and don't expect anyone to sit here and troubleshoot for me. That's my job, not yours.

Was just curious if the upgrade process was intended to be taken step by step
Or if I could assume just running the installer and in a scenario where code was not modified a 1.12.2 would upgrade to 2.2.1 just fine.

The official documentation - https://docs.cmsmadesimple.org/upgrading/to-cmsms-2.x - does not specify this detail.

The only thing I do know is the database is not corrupt, I can run clean installs of Wordpress or any other framework just fine. In my searching on this forum I've seen some references to mysqli needing to be specified in the config.php so I will have to investigate that myself. Again, my problem.

I'm at the point where it's probably easier for me to tell them we go into maintenance mode and redo everything from scratch but I thought I would investigate my options before telling them that.

We still support upgrading directly to 2.2.1 from 1.12. But be prepared, it will probably not be a smooth upgrade. Particularly if your site is hacked. That tells me that the original developer didn't have a firm grasp of CMSMS and may have done some silly things.

Support for upgrading directly from 1.12.x will probably stop when we release 2.3.

And your database may not be entirely corrupt, but some tables may be. There's an option in 1.12 to test that under 'System Maintenance'.

Ok, I'll maybe spend a few hours with the 2.2.1 installer and see if I can get it to at least install and load up. Then I can tackle the PHP errors from there. Might have some luck if I strip the customized stuff out and get the checksum to pass before the upgrade.

System Maintenance shows 140 tables found, no structural errors detected so I assume all is well in that department. But that's not to say there isn't other issues. The previous developer tied CMSMS and OpenCart together... It's a mess.

Thanks.