An easy way to upgrade from v4.6.12.1 to latest?

[georgebkk]

I’m really not ready to upgrade to current version yet, but security is important.

I have two questions for you guys 🙏

1. Will the upgrade preserve our current forum template without risk of need to redo the edits (for example ad units and plugins that generates display blocks).

2. Is is a lengthy upgrade? Does the upgrade need to go through all topics (millions of topics), or not?

 

[Marc]

1 hour ago, thaivisa said:

1. Will the upgrade preserve our current forum template without risk of need to redo the edits (for example ad units and plugins that generates display blocks).

Only the author of your theme can tell you what would be affected on upgrade of your theme, along with custom blocks. Ad blocks that are added using our standard ad system will work the same.

1 hour ago, thaivisa said:

2. Is is a lengthy upgrade? Does the upgrade need to go through all topics (millions of topics), or not?

It would not generally go through every post, other than rebuilding the search index if needed (which does not need to be offline for and is done as a background task). As far as "How long" is concerned, it really depends on your service provider. 

[georgebkk]

@Marc Stridgen Do you believe Google Adsense JS codes and other added tags will be preserved in the upgrade?

[georgebkk]

On 6/23/2023 at 8:04 PM, Marc Stridgen said:

Only the author of your theme can tell you what would be affected on upgrade of your theme, along with custom blocks. Ad blocks that are added using our standard ad system will work the same.

It would not generally go through every post, other than rebuilding the search index if needed (which does not need to be offline for and is done as a background task). As far as "How long" is concerned, it really depends on your service provider. 

Could you please elaborate on "not generally"? We have a very powerful AWS instance and database running the community, but can not risk a long downtime if it goes through asll posts and messages again.

Search index rebuilding is not an issue. 

Custom blocks is not an issue either.

Please advise.

[Randy Calvert]

11 minutes ago, thaivisa said:

@Marc Stridgen Do you believe Google Adsense JS codes and other added tags will be preserved in the upgrade?

If they were added via the recommended way (from the integrations section of ACP for GTM for example), it’s preserved.  If you manually stuck it in your theme, you might have to manually update your theme. 

[Randy Calvert]

9 minutes ago, thaivisa said:

Could you please elaborate on "not generally"? We have a very powerful AWS instance and database running the community, but can not risk a long downtime if it goes through asll posts and messages again.

Search index rebuilding is not an issue. 

Custom blocks is not an issue either.

Please advise.

4.6 to 4.7 does not change the database for post content. So it’s not like upgrading from version 3 to version 4 where there was db conversations and content conversions. But there may be some components that might need to rebuild such as the search index or achievement recounts etc. Those activities may be done in the background and take a long time. 

The biggest change from 4.6 to 4.7 was the move to php8. You will need to move to php8, make sure it’s compatible with the latest version of IPB and then upload fresh files from the client area and manually upgrade (domain.com/admin/upgrade). You would also have to make sure any third party resources/applications have php8 compatible versions.  That honestly is your biggest chance of downtime. 

[Marc]

We are unable to guarentee how long an upgrade will take on a self hosted environment. Generally that upgrade shouldnt take too long but I would advise doing a test run if you are uncertain whether you want to go ahead due to a downtime.