Discussion Forum

tsamant

Member

From: Chicago

Registered: May 14, 2015

Posts: 52

Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

I am trying to upgrade from 4.2 to 4.4 and have a few immediate problems: e.g. custom classes not found,  routed templates searched for in the wrong place (basic) etc.

I did the "upgrade" with git pull in the bigtree directory, and now I wonder if that's the right way. Especially since the admin developer tab began to go through an upgrade process a little later (which I stopped).

So, since it's early for specific questions:

1. What's the recommended way to go from php5.6 -> 7.2  AND bigtree 4.2 -> 4.4 ?

2. Are there some changes to custom code that are a must? (We have a custom router among other things.)

3. Can the process of converting file browser data be speeded up or done from cli.

4. (This is documented but unfortunately can't find it) What PHP libraries are required? E.g. curl.

Thank you,
Tushar

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 978

Re: Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

1. Doing a git pull on your BigTree core should be fine. You need to wait for the whole upgrade process to go through in the Developer tab before your front-end begins working again. This is because the data storage for templates / modules / callouts / settings transitions from the database to JSON storage -- the core is then looking for the JSON objects that don't yet exist if you stop the upgrade before it finishes.

2. You may need to adjust your custom router to include the composer autoload file (vendor/autoload.php). I'm not sure how much of it is customized, but many features of the back-end now rely on composer packages that are autoloaded.

3. Unfortunately, no. If you have a load of files in the file manager, BigTree has to walk through each page of them, do file lookup information, create a new list view crop, etc. If files are stored in the cloud (vs local) it is even a bit slower.

4. cURL, gd, mysqli, json, ctype, openssl are the extensions required by 4.4 -- there are a few optional extensions that enhance the experience (mimetype, exif, locale) but BigTree should run fine without them

tsamant

Member

From: Chicago

Registered: May 14, 2015

Posts: 52

Re: Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

Tim, thank you! I am going to start fresh and see how it goes. I have two questions:

1. Will a 4.2-compatible database and 4.4 BigTree trigger this upgrade, just by loading the developer tab?

2. Does the upgrade modify or delete cloud images? Almost all our images, on dev or prod, are served from the same S3 bucket. (File manager being unusable for a while is okay, but user-facing images need to keep serving).

Thanks again!
Tushar

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 978

Re: Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

1. Yes, it will begin updating as soon as you hit the developer tab.
2. It doesn't actually modify cloud images, but it does create new thumbnails of them for the new Files tab list view. It works with both cloud based and locally stored files, so having them in S3 shouldn't be a problem.

tsamant

Member

From: Chicago

Registered: May 14, 2015

Posts: 52

Re: Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

This is fantastic. Thanks again Tim!

Tushar

tsamant

Member

From: Chicago

Registered: May 14, 2015

Posts: 52

Re: Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

Following up to the upgrade saga:

The upgrade took about 95 minutes and went well. No major problems to the front end that we can see so far. Some questions:

1. There is a files tab in admin, new to us. It looks fairly intuitive; however, the "File Browser" that we have and use for attaching images to tours, buildings etc is now empty. How do we reuse our S3 images?

2. Google Analytics: we want to disable this in admin. How to do that?

3. Should custom/json-db/, vendor/, and cron-run.php be put in .gitignore?

4. There are various minor warnings in admin. An example:

Warning: strtr() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /var/www/caf/bigtree/core/inc/bigtree/cms.php on line 1754

Is there some obvious thing I have overlooked that is causing this?

We have no set date for upgrading, so no rush.

Thanks,
Tushar

tsamant

Member

From: Chicago

Registered: May 14, 2015

Posts: 52

Re: Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

Hi, Tim,

Any word on this? It seems the admin backend and frontend might have different ideas about what the file browser ajax endpoint should be, admin/ajax/files vs admin/ajax/file-browser . Wondering if there is an upgrade step I have missed?

Tushar

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 978

Re: Upgrading 4.2 to 4.4

Sorry! For some reason I never got the email ping that there was a response to this thread.

1. There is a files tab in admin, new to us. It looks fairly intuitive; however, the "File Browser" that we have and use for attaching images to tours, buildings etc is now empty. How do we reuse our S3 images?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The default BigTree file browser (for when you hit "Browse..." buttons and in the WYSIWYG) hasn't changed at all other than to remove the button to upload files directly (it now takes you to the files tab). If it's empty there might be a custom override somewhere failing.

2. Google Analytics: we want to disable this in admin. How to do that?

There should be a disconnect button under Dashboard -> Analytics -> Configure.

3. Should custom/json-db/, vendor/, and cron-run.php be put in .gitignore?

Definitely not! /custom/json-db/ is your site's configuration (templates, settings, callouts, modules, extensions, etc) and the main purpose of the 4.4 upgrade! Having that in version control allows you to deploy new templates, callouts, etc without touching the database. cron-run.php doesn't really need to exist if you aren't running nightly cron jobs, but it doesn't hurt to have that in version control either.

4. There are various minor warnings in admin. An example:

I'm not sure where this error stems from -- line 1754 of 4.4.5 is a preg_replace statement and not strtr.