Hello

Please read my posting carefully and complete!

What are the steps to upgrade from a forum version 2.1.1 to latest version ?

Your forum seems to run on a webserver with an very old configuration (at least with a very old PHP version 5.x). You will have to upgrade to a newer version of PHP during the upgrade process.

I understand it must be done in steps.

You can directly upgrade to version 2.3.5 in a first step. Then you can upgrade to version 2.4.24 in a second step. At that point the target version at the end of the upgrade process up to version 2.4.24 is PHP in a version between 5.4 and 7.2 (but not newer).

You can also upgrade to version 20220803.1 which corresponds to 2.5.4 in the old version number scheme but there are a few things to bear in mind.

This affects only the upgrade from version 2.4.19.1, 2.4.20, 2.4.21, 2.4.22, 2.4.23 and 2.4.24 to a newer stable version (20220508.1, 20220509.1, 20220517.1, 20220529.1 or 20220803.1).

No e-mail-address doublettes in the userdata

At one point we decided to make e-mail-addresses unique in the user data. That made it impossible to have as an administrator a working account and a testing account with the same e-mail-address in the userdata. Having such cases in the userdata will break the upgrade process and leave you with a broken installation.

This is caused by an error I made in the upgrade script and will be solved in a future release (I'm working on it). If you can't ensure unique e-mail-addresses in the userdata it's better to stop the upgrade with MLF version 2.4.24 at the moment.

The 2.1.1 has been modified (visual).

You have to adapt your changes to the newer templates by hand. There have been many changes in the HTML source code and CSS between your version 2.1.1 and more or less current versions like 2.4.24. Many of them are hidden under the hood, being not visible but are there for security reasons (i.e. in forms). So it will not work only to take your theme and to make it available in the new MLF version. One would not be able to send a new or edited posting to the forum.

My recommendation is to take the new template as basis and to apply your changes to the new template. Make a copy of the default template with a new name, to apply your changes and to load it up into the directory themes beside the default theme. You can test your changes with changing your personal setting for the theme. Only you will see your changes during the tests until you finalised the changes. If ready you can set the customised theme as the forums theme in the forum settings.

Its a french forum.

I can't ensure the French translation to be complete but you'll find untranslated strings being in English language. Improvements to the translation are welcome.

It contains: 199944 messages dans 40668 fils de discussion, 1066 utilisateurs enregistrés.

Can it be done without loosing anything (posts, users, ...) ?

Generally: yes. We received a few reports about issues with the upgrade process during the years but none of them was reports about lost data (userdata, entries and so on). This does not mean, that a backup of the database content is a superfluous endeavour!

Is there a script to do it automatically ?

Make a backup of the complete installation and one of the database content. Download the version 2.3.5, unzip it and upload the file update/update_2.x-2.3.php to the respective directory of your webspace. Until then nothing happened.

You'll find the upgrade script in the admin panel under the menu item "Update". Maybe there are offered two upgrade scripts. Select the right one (update_2.x-2.3.php) by clicking the link. In the next step you have to provide your admin password. After sending the password the script applies all changes to the database scheme and will show you a list of all directories and files that you need to upload from the archive of the new version.

After the upload of the directories and files the upgrade to the target version MLF 2.3.5 is complete. Now it is time to check if you have to activate a newer version of PHP. At least you should activate PHP 5.4, better PHP 5.6. At that point the forum will also work with PHP 5.2 but with MLF version 2.4.8 we raised the minimal PHP version up to 5.4 and the next step should upgrade the forum to version 2.4.24.

The upgrade to MLF version 2.4.24 will work like the previous upgrade with two differences. First one: a new upgrade script named update_2.3.5-2.4.php instead of update_2.x-2.3.php and a new requirement you have to fulfill with uploading the file config/VERSION to the directory config before running the upgrade script update_2.3.5-2.4.php. With these exceptions you have to perform the same steps as described above for the upgrade to MLF version 2.3.5 (database backup, running the upgrade script, upload of the new directories and files).

As you can read (if you arrived here), the upgrade is a lot of work and not done in ten minutes, especially when you applied own changes to the theme. Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that it is worth it. There was many new features and enhancements, there was solved several security issues and bug fixes.

Before you start, document your changes of the theme for yourself. Then download the MLF versions 2.3.5 and 2.4.24, unpack them and study the files of the default theme, especially of the MLF version 2.4.24, to identify the files where you have to apply your changes. If that's ready, it would be time to start the first upgrade step.

If you have questions or things to clarify, ask here.

We should be able to help you if you have no extraordinary special edge cases.

Tschö, Auge