Moving eZPublish 3.9.x to eZPublish 4.x

Tuesday 09 February 2010 12:42:19 pm

Hi Clemens!

Well, obviously, first of all you need to upgrade your server to PHP5 to be able to upgrade eZ Publish. I suggest you to make a local copy of your website and do the upgrade in house, while taking your server offline to do the upgrade of PHP at the same time. This way, there will a minimum downtime to your website. Ofcourse, you'll need two local servers for this to work, one that hosts PHP4 and one that hosts PHP5. When done, just upload your upgraded installation, restore the database and you're set.

Now, as a general rule of thumb, you DON'T have to do all the incremental versions while upgrading. In 99% of the cases, the latest one in a release cycle should be fine. For example, 3.9.3 -> 3.9.5 -> 3.10.1 -> 4.0.7 -> 4.1.4 -> 4.2.0. I would recommend you to read the upgrade instructions ( http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/upgrading ) very carefully, they're all that's needed to get you started.

1) In this case for example, you use PHP4 while executing the scripts from 3.9.5 and 3.10.1 versions, and PHP5 for the rest of them.

2) Well, you really can't be sure till the very end and checking it by yourself. Backup of your original installation IS A MUST, in case anything goes wrong. You can also make DB backups between each upgrade step (when done upgrading to 3.10.1, for example), so you can easily go back to the previous step if something goes wrong and not having to do the upgrade all the way from the start.

3) Any custom designs you have must be changed so all the override templates reside in override/templates folder as specified in your override.ini. Also, if you have PHP code in your extensions, it'll probably be have to changed to accomodate new syntax rules of PHP5 and changes to eZ Publish API. Also, take notice that eZ Publish 4.0.7 is the last version that uses eZXml library. In 4.1.0 and later, it was replaced by PHP5 DOM, so keep an eye out for that.

ezdhtml extension was replaced by ezoe (Online Editor) in few latest versions of eZ Publish. ezdhtml doesn't work on PHP5.

4) Converting the DB and your templates to UTF8. Then doing upgrades to multilanguage url aliases introduced in 3.10.x (in that order)...

Once again, do read the instructions on the link above, those are a big help and you'll need them!

Good luck with the upgrade!

eZ Publish certified developer

http://ez.no/certification/verify/350658

Thursday 11 February 2010 8:21:59 am

@Edi, Bruce, thanks for both insightful replies.

However, there is one thing that is still not clear to me.

Base plan

Goal: upgrade with the minimum effort that doesn't have any critical risks.

Servers: 2 php4 servers, 1 php5 server

PHP4 Server 1: eZ 3.x (current installation)

PHP4 Server 2: aiming to get: eZ 3.10.1 on it (initially a copy of PHP4 Server 1)

PHP5: aiming to get installation of PHP4 Server 2 to eZ 4.2 (initially a copy of PHP4 Server 2)

Your answers have helped me on some details already, but there is still one major thing missing in my view. How often do I need to re-copy all the eZPublish distribution files for this?

In my view there are two options for the PHP4 part of this:

1) Do I need to 'install' my website on eZ 3.9.5, and then consecutively on 3.10.1?

2) Do I need to 'install' my website on eZ 3.10.1 and then execute the /update files from the eZ 3.9.5 installation on my eZ 3.10.1 installation and then afterwards the updates from 3.10.1 in the right order?

What is the best option for the PHP5 part? Just the updates or everytime a new distribution-files-installation-update?

Thanks!!

Clemens

Saturday 13 February 2010 3:08:17 am

Heya Bruce,

Thanks for the link, and the plan with detail. I think I'll be able to handle the upgrade process now. I'll post any problems/solutions here!

Regards,

Clemens

Monday 22 March 2010 3:57:15 pm

Hi Brian

Apply this patch to ezcontentobjecttreenode.php

@@ -3992,7 +3992,15 @@
         {
             if ( !isset( $parentNode ) )
                 $parentNode = $this->fetchParent();
-            $pathIdentificationString = $parentNode->attribute( 'path_identification_string' );
+            if( is_object( $parentNode ) )
+            {
+               $pathIdentificationString = $parentNode->attribute( 'path_identification_string' );
+           }
+           else
+            {
+                eZDebug::writeError( 'Failed to fetch parent node for pathIdentificationName "' . $pathIdentificationName .
+                                     '" and parent_node_id ' . $this->attribute( 'parent_node_id' ) );
+            }
         }
         if ( strlen( $pathIdentificationString ) > 0 )
             $pathIdentificationString .= '/' . $pathIdentificationName;

Cheers
Bruce

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