MySQL upgrade killed Zen 1.2.6

[CurrentWave]

Okay - I spent a day reading posts and believe I'm barking up the wrong tree, forgive and ignore my past questions.

First, I set up Zen 1.2.6 for a flat fee on the time it took me to customize it to fit a schools needs. I didn't keep up with Zen, because I don't use it and I don't go around making money off it on a ongoing basis. Just trying to save a non-profit some money. However, their part-time web-person did not keep up on Zen any more than I did, which I can understand, but know is a big mistake. Of course their store went down, and I was called to find out why. I'm doing this for free, much like the Zen team, so please don't be hard on me because I'm not a full-time Zenner.

I did back up the DB and the entire website including the old store/Zen - Yea, one point for me! However, I was grossly underestimating what upgrading would entail, and miss understanding what I was in for when I began posting - wow!

So here I am trying to help a non-profit for free with a free product supported for free :-) by great people. And I'm in dire need of some free advise on best-way-to-go. I am not a DB or cart expert, these are not my areas of focus, so don't assume I know anything.... please, LOL.

(1) Right now the school has to use mySQL version 5, will this be okay (stable) for Zen 1.3.7 or (problematic) should we check out other options?

(2) If we can go ahead with 1.3.7 and mySQL 5 - then is there a way to import all the products, prices, images into the new Zen/DB and just use the default templates/settings -or- does importing bring in all our settings and so contaminate the new one? In other words is there a no-frills, down-but not to dirty, less work way to move from 1.2? to 1.3? Because if we are looking at a total do over we need to know, and this is not clear in my mind at this time.

Thanks so much for all your time and advise, especially Dr.Byte and the 'Team'!

[DrByte]

(1) Right now the school has to use mySQL version 5, will this be okay (stable) for Zen 1.3.7 or (problematic) should we check out other options?

1.3.7 should be largely fine with MySQL 5. Each version fixes more known compatibility issues. The only known issues in v1.3.7 are related to copying attributes from one product to another, if I remember correctly.

[DrByte]

(2) If we can go ahead with 1.3.7 and mySQL 5 - then is there a way to import all the products, prices, images into the new Zen/DB and just use the default templates/settings -or- does importing bring in all our settings and so contaminate the new one? In other words is there a no-frills, down-but not to dirty, less work way to move from 1.2? to 1.3? Because if we are looking at a total do over we need to know, and this is not clear in my mind at this time.

The zc_install upgrade script is intended to take care of all that.
The normal process (as far as the *database* is concerned) is:
- create a new database
- install new version of Zen Cart, using new folder and new database
- backup old database
- import old into new, overtop of the freshly-installed new database
- run zc_install to upgrade the now-old data in the new database to the new structure

The fact that you were being prompted about out-of-sequence upgrade steps suggests that maybe the database backup you had may not be as reliable as you hoped.
Or, it could be that certain features have been removed from the database since their initiation in the older versions (the version-detection is based on features added at certain times, not simply on version numbers), and thus are being recommended for upgrading. I would just skip those older steps in most cases.

Once the database upgrade is complete, the new version of Zen Cart in the new folder should be able to run fine -- the template will be looking quite odd, and if you didn't copy the product images forward, you'll be missing those as well. The images can be copied over to easily remedy that problem.
The template may have to be rebuilt ... and in fact that is recommended when upgrading from very old code to newer code, esp between major version-number changes.