Happy New Year - and our adventure with 1.5.5 b , c , d ...

All the best to zenners for 2017. I decided to devote the holiday period to a full make-over of our flagship site - tagmakers . co . uk and had to work from a zc.1.5.1a version...

So... we get going with an upgrade to 1.5.5b and guess what?
Halfway through we are alerted to v.1.5.5c - so we pull back and call up winmerge once again and spend a couple of hours on it,
then suddenly see ALERT... new version 1.5.5d .

We had a good chuckle, because while we're soldiering away at computers on Christmas Eve/Day/Boxing Day, so is Dr Byte and a few others.

Mammoth task, as we cleaned out a whole raft of plugins accumulate over the years that either no longer work with 1.5.5, or have no real functional value in the world of Mobile Browsing.

Fortunately, we have access to good MySQL skills, so we did a lot of dbase editing and cleaning in php_my_admin, as opposed to the "safe" route of a programmatic upgrade - but the process took a good 3 days to complete.

Again... huge thanks to all the helpers on the forum - we needed past and present advice, and as has been the case for the last 12 years, I can rely on fellow zenners to rush in to assist. particular thanks to Dr Byte, Lat9 and MC12345678 - along with many others - mprough, picaflor and divavocals in particular for all your fine work.

Best wshes to all for 2017.

500 error on tagmakersDOTcoDOTuk:(

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Originally Posted by schoolboy

I decided to devote the holiday period to a full make-over of our flagship site..

So... we get going with an upgrade to 1.5.5b and ...
then suddenly see ALERT... new version 1.5.5d .

We had a good chuckle, because while we're soldiering away at computers on Christmas Eve/Day/Boxing Day, so is Dr Byte and a few others.

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You're not the only one with that upgrade ambition.
I was planning a severe upgrade from 1.3.9h after neglecting my "play" site for nearly six years.
So imagine my experience as I saw one update after another from ZenLand over Christmas through to New Year's Eve while I'm still trying to make sense of nearly six-year old notes and all the work needed.

EEK! Gasp! What the f*****!!!??

I'll be making my first test upgrade attempt this week....


Unless there's another release. :cool:

worldmaker, be sure to take a look at https://www.zen-cart.com/entry.php?3...d-of-upgrading

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dbltoe

500 error on tagmakersDOTcoDOTuk:(

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Yes... we are loading nearly 12,000 DENY IP statements into .htaccess to keep out the Russians, Chinese, Ukranians, Koreans, Nigerians, Belarusians, Azerbijanians, Croatians, Serbians, Moldovians, Albanians... you get the picture. There was a faulty entry and it took us about an hour to find it.

Be grateful if you could try the URL again.

PS: You too have been a great help in the past. I neglected to mention you in my original post, but thanks for all your valuable input in many requests I have posted over the years.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by worldmaker

You're not the only one with that upgrade ambition.
I was planning a severe upgrade from 1.3.9h after neglecting my "play" site for nearly six years.
So imagine my experience as I saw one update after another from ZenLand over Christmas through to New Year's Eve while I'm still trying to make sense of nearly six-year old notes and all the work needed.

EEK! Gasp! What the f*****!!!??

I'll be making my first test upgrade attempt this week....


Unless there's another release. :cool:

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Fortunately, these minor upgrades are usually very simple and quick to implement. I ALWAYS make use of Dr Byte's filechange logs. This helps to make any upgrade as efficient as possible. The logs basically tell you which files to run through winmerge, so you don't waste time running a whole raft of files that have not been altered.

The challenge we faced was really with the database. Having installed a whole raft of mods in the past - many of which included database modifications and whose uninstall.sql files are often themselves redundant, we felt that a php_my_admin approach would give us better "visibility" on the state of the affected tables. Of course, messing about in php_my_admin is not for the "novice", but I have access to some guys with considerable skill here. Had to pay them, of course, but this is part of running any business.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dbltoe

worldmaker, be sure to take a look at https://www.zen-cart.com/entry.php?3...d-of-upgrading

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Yes, got that, printed and read through it a couple of times to compare with all my six-year-old notes.

:cool:

schoolboy, it's working now. Thanks for the flowers, it really works both ways as you have often been an answer to a prayer at problem time.

worldmaker, be sure to tour the plugins for new mods. You'll find that many you thought were necessary six years ago are no longer needed or replaced with something far better. Before finalizing a template, we recommend using lat9's clone a template. https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=2087. This saves problems on a later upgrade. You might also look at our mod to simplify color changes. It does work with all current versions of Responsive Classic Template. https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=2088

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dbltoe

worldmaker, be sure to tour the plugins for new mods. You'll find that many you thought were necessary six years ago are no longer needed or replaced with something far better.

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Thanks for your kind thoughts. I've checked out my existing plugins, only three, and deleted one as out-of-date. The other two appear to be suitable for upgrade and I completed those last night.

Now the fun begins working my way through the template and seeing what's changed in all these years - a useful exercise for me to polish up my skills.

:blink:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by schoolboy

Yes... we are loading nearly 12,000 DENY IP statements into .htaccess to keep out the Russians, Chinese, Ukranians, Koreans, Nigerians, Belarusians, Azerbijanians, Croatians, Serbians, Moldovians, Albanians... you get the picture. There was a faulty entry and it took us about an hour to find it.

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Where did you source this list of bad IPs from?
How do you keep it up to date?
Are you prepared to share it?