CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

On Monday, I upgraded the WWOOF UK web site from CiviCRM 3.0.2 to 3.3.6.  Only our hosts Circle Interactive have shell access so they helped expanding files and doing file/database backups/restores.  Here are some notes on the process which may prove useful to someone else.

I rehearsed the upgrade on a separate test site quite some time ago, and asked the main admin users to give the upgraded site a whirl.  I was fairly confident it would be OK, but it turned out to be not without incident.

I'd previously worked out that table civicrm_location_type was missing a row which was needed during the upgrade.  I forgot this when doing the live upgrade, so we had to revert the civi database and start again.

In my test I'd found that upgrading direct to 3.3.3 didn't work as there was a problem in table civicrm_membership_status to do with column "label".  I'd found that we needed to upgrade to 3.2.5 first, and then upgrade again to 3.3.6.  So this is the approach I took.

As part of my testing, I'd carefully looked through all the PHP and TPL customisations on the site. (which I hadn't done in the first place).  I worked out that some weren't needed - primarily as they were customisations to get upgraded features.  I've now carefully commented and documented all the changes so we can remember what they are.

These other points probably appear in the standard upgrade notes.

I renamed the UpdateMembershipRecord.php.txt file.  However our existing cron did not include the username, password and key, so these needed to be added.  The standard PHP file itself did not need to be changed.

The CiviMail user needed to be given extra Drupal permissions, ie all CiviCRM ones.  The Drupal site log now includes entries for every CiviMail cron update.

Similarly, anonymous and authenticated users needed to have extra CiviCRM permissions ticked:

• profile create
• profile edit
• profile listings
• profile view

A lot of global settings needed checking/resetting, including the Currency, Date format and Google Maps API key.

To get the GBP currency to stick on Membership Contributions, I had to go into each Contribution Amounts and press Save.

I also upgraded various other Drupal modules that were out of date.

The site admin staff say that they think the site is running fractionally slower than before.  Does this ring true for anyone else?  The site has cached CSS and JS and Boost enabled, as before.

As you may have seen, we've had a problem with date formats, which I've posted elsewhere.

So: apart from a couple of hiccups, it's hopefully gone OK, though a non-trivial task...

Chris