The phpBB Group released a new version of phpBB, 3.2.1 in July. For me and a number of my clients updating and upgrading to it has been nothing but trouble. In two cases I was simply unable to get the upgrade/update to work on their machines. Both the automatic update and the changed files methods didn’t work. When I’ve had success it was from copying up all the files (minus the config.php file) and then running the update. This can mess up any style changes that were made, so they have to be reapplied. Notes on these upgrades are below. Work in general was slow in July and due to the upgrade issue time consuming and not very profitable. I hope the phpBB Group gets this figured out. As usual all client information has be anonymized.
- A client that sent me $50 in February finally asked me to do some work. He tried to upgrade to phpBB 3.1.10 and failed. I helped straightening out issues with his site after his upgrade. There were module errors (caused by a duplicate extension tab) that required replacing the content of the modules table with content from a reference database. After trial and error I also reinstalled Tapatalk. I then reinstalled the BOOTS proprietary style.
- Client failed installing my digests extension (3.2.2). An error said the ACP digest module category already existed, which was most likely a result of not installing it correctly. I removed the digests modules from modules table, uploaded digests version 3.2.3 and it installed. I made corrections to address timezone object bug. Testing however revealed issues. Digests were going out for periods months in the past as the extension had not been working for many months. Resetting the digest mailer didn’t work, or changing the last timestamp for digests going out to the current time. So there was a large queue to get through. Also the digest cron seemed to work when digests are disabled. This condition was not detected before and should not happen due to the extension architecture. Some sort of cron seems to be triggered on the forum once a minute causing digests to go out.
- Troubleshooting. Alleged malware, not in the forum (I checked forum software against a reference) but found in site’s index.htm file, at the bottom. Removed <div> tag on the page, started a rescan and sent a support ticket to Siteground to unblock the site.
- Client had a new version of the black style he wanted installed to fix an annoying issues with the navigation dropdowns, which were shown by default overlaying content for the first post in a topic. Moved the old version to an old_black folder. Placed new version of style in the black folder. Reuploaded the two logo files. Since it is a SCCS style, I edited _style_config.sccs to hide the forum sitename text. Recompiled style by first downloading Artodia’s SCCS compiler and using that to recompile the style. Made some minor stylesheet edits to not show the navigation dropdown by default, which took a lot of testing using the browser’s object inspector to figure out what CSS changes were needed.
- Moved a website plus its forum to a new host. phpBB was performing oddly on old host. Moved to siteground.com on my recommendation. There were lots of files to move. Unclear for awhile which files to move. HTTP authentication was set to get into forum, so the mechanism had to be recreated on the new host. Changed absolute path to .htpasswd file but it didn’t work. It resulted in HTTP 404 (not found) errors. Eventually after futile tech support chat I figured out it was due to PHP not being enabled. Enabled PHP 7.0 and it worked. Client asked me to install extensions I thought would be useful so installed Advanced BBCode, Precise Similar Topics and Recent topics extensions.
- Updated forum from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.1. Discovered an apparent bug in the update program, as I had to delete vendor folder, upload 3.2.1 source for the folder, delete cache/production and then I could run the database update.
- Updated forum from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.1. Expected errors occurred when uploading only changed files so I uploaded all files, purged the cache and the upgrade worked. This approach meant I had to reapply the logo.
- Attempted to upgraded forum from 3.0.12 to 3.2.1. There were issues during upgrade, essentially and inconsistent database. Cleaning up the database with Support Toolkit (STK) caused a STK error. I eventually figured out the STK error was due to language file common.php not being in the en folder. Upgraded to 3.0.14, then 3.1.7-PL1 (could not get into ACP), then 3.2.1. Applied flat style and logo. The upgrade seemed to work, at least for me, but failed for the client the next day during multiuser use. The failures produced core dumps, but the local system administrator could not determine the exact issue. This is still ongoing. I suspect there are new things about phpBB 3.2 that won’t work on the current host that are causing the issue. I suspect he could upgrade to 3.1.11 successfully.
- Ultimately failed attempt to upgrade plain vanilla forum on GoDaddy hosting from phpBB 3.1.10 to 3.2.1. Issue was during updating the database. A “No file input” error message was traced to incompatibility between FastCGI or nginx and the Symphony2 library. Symphony2 could not see the file. Attempted to use SSH to upgrade the database. Issue for me was I could not connect reliably with SSH over my Comcast connection. Apparently Comcast routers slow down SSH traffic, at least to GoDaddy and there’s nothing I can do about it! Client was able to SSH successfully and tried to run a manual database upgrade. He tried various versions of PHP and couldn’t find PHP 5.4+. So restored 3.1.10 forum and provided guidance for future. When GoDaddy contract is up client may rehost elsewhere. He is considering Siteground.
- Applied a new logo on a phpBB 3.0.13-PL1 forum. Turned off mChat.
- Updated a client from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.1 but it would only work by uploading all the files for 3.2.1. This messed up his styles which inherited from prosilver. Reapplied the file changes as best I could, however the icons and row heights look a bit off. However, the client was satisfied.
