{"id":1166,"date":"2012-01-08T20:35:29","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T01:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fiveforks.com\/ted\/?p=1166"},"modified":"2013-04-22T10:18:50","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T15:18:50","slug":"wiki-upgraded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2012\/01\/wiki-upgraded\/","title":{"rendered":"Wiki Upgraded"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in August, I had tried and failed<\/a> to upgrade the Flashlight Wiki’s<\/a> software from MediaWiki 1.16 to 1.17. For whatever reason, I thought it would be a good time to try again. Only now they are up to version 1.18.<\/p>\n

So I downloaded the new software and then uploaded it to my server. I put the compressed file in a new folder, but really it unzips into its own folder, so that isn’t necessary. I renamed the folder flashlightwiki instead of flashlightwiki where the original is. I also did a backup of the database and all the files in the original installation. I left the zip archive of files in place with restricted permissions in case I need to recover quickly. Last time I had to re-upload the zip file to recover.<\/p>\n

This is where it gets tricky. I guess the way to do it is to go ahead and run the installer and generate a localsettings.php file. So I tried that out and it worked okay I guess except the wiki itself did not work exactly right when I was done. So instead I pulled up a copy of the new localsettings and the old one and did a line by line comparison to make all the same changes to the new one that I had made to the old one, while leaving any new stuff in place. Then I dragged over the images and extensions folders to the new installation.<\/p>\n

And I got an error. I think it was something in my meta tags extension that wasn’t working. So I disabled that extension by editing localsettings. And it worked! Sort of. There were still some problems that I spent all afternoon tracking down and fixing. It would probably help to just print a copy of the old localsettings to use as a go-by. At some point I renamed the old folder and named the new folder flashlightwiki to make it the official copy. I also needed to move the .htaccess folder at this point.<\/p>\n

There were some customizations I had done to the stylesheet of the old installation which I had made by modifying the css file in Monobook called main.css (which you aren’t supposed to do). I was able to eventually get these customizations to work using wiki pages instead, described at the end of this blog post of customizations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I also tried to make my localsettings.php file a little more organized. Before I had my customizations all over the place. I would include a comment so I would know what I did, but really I don’t think the order matters so much and it is better to do all the new stuff at the bottom. But some stuff involves user preferences or disabling something in the top section. Moving my stuff to the bottom might also make upgrading easier. There is supposed to be some automatic upgrade tool, but I wasn’t able to figure that out.<\/p>\n

The software was upgraded in November, so hopefully they won’t change it for a little while.<\/p>\n

Really, I think the process\u00a0should be\u00a0easy:<\/p>\n