Preparing your site and community for a major upgrade can be a daunting task. However you can lessen the impact if you are informed and prepared before hand. Today, I hope to give you some hints and tips that will ease the transition for you, your staff and the users of your community. Upgrading to a new major version of a software package can be time consuming and shouldn't be handled while under a time-crunch or hastily. The first thing you want to do is plan for the upgrade and make sure your community is aware of potential downtime when the upgrade is performed. Hopefully these steps will help you do this.
First, you need to outline your upgrade steps. Do you have critical addons that are needed in your community? What about custom styles and graphics? Do you have a testing team to make sure all the functions of your community work properly? Do you already have a testing environment? All of these need to be answered before you start.
Now that you have answered the questions above you want to create a test environment for your system. This environment should be as clean as possible but contain enough raw data for an adequate test. The easiest way to do this is to create a new installation of vBulletin in a directory called vbtest. Once the test environment is up and running, make sure it works similarly to your live forums. Update the settings, usergroup permissions and forum structure so that is closely matches your live installation.
Now you can have your staff prepopulate the forums with posts and threads or you can use something like the technique outlined here:
Populating your test forum with RSS Feeds
Some people copy their database completely and use that. However if you have addon products, that can cause interference with the upgrade process.
Next, you're going to want to get ready to update your style. Since vBulletin 4.0 will have a different style and variable declarations, your old styles will not work properly. Also the upgrade process will overwrite your default templates so you won't have them to refer to. My recommendation is to make a copy of the 3.8.X defaults for reference. To do this you'll need to edit a file. In your vBulletin files go to the install folder and copy vbulletin-style.xml to a second file called vbulletin-style-38x.xml. Now open this file in your favorite text editor. Near the top it should contain the following line:
Code:
<style name="MASTER STYLE" vbversion="3.8.2" product="vbulletin" type="master">
Change it to:
Code:
<style name="MASTER STYLE" vbversion="3.8.2" product="vbulletin" type="custom">
Now in your Admin Control Panel go to Styles & Templates → Download / Upload Styles. Upload the file vbulletin-style-38x.xml as a new style with no parent. When it is done, if you look at the style you will notice that every template is marked as customized. This means they won't be overwritten when you run the vBulletin 4 upgrade script. Now you have a reference point to compare against the new templates. When you upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1, vBulletin will do this automatically for you but unfortunately not this time.
Next we'll talk about addons and installed products.
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