Darko Martić - IT Engineer, eBusiness and eCommerce Professional
Upgrade large phpBB2 to phpBB3
By “large” I mean a forum with database of 300+ MB in size.
One of my clients wanted to change hosting company as his website grow over the past few years and he wasn’t satisfied with GoDaddy’s shared hosting, but also with GoDaddy service at all…
So I recommended him a MediaTemple grid hosting as I’m there with my websites.
I’m very satisfied with them, with their responsive support and of course with their great servers that promises high speed both with CPU and a network.
This was an excellent time for me to transfer this forum from phpBB2 to a phpBB3 which is a new platform of one of the most popular open-source forum applications.
Previously I tryied to do the migration to ver3 but not very succesfully as I couldn’t bypass troubles I was having on GoDaddy with phpBB3 convertor tool, due to PHP configuration I had at that point of time on their shared hosting.
First step would be to transfer a database.
MySQL database dump was easy to do as it is being done through a Control Panel on GoDaddy. After succesful database backup, you need to transfer it’s .SQL file on a new server.
“Inserting” that .SQL file into a new server’s database was easy thing to do with a tool called – BigDump: Staggered MySQL Dump Importer.
This PHP script takes care of max_execution_time and with Javascript it refreshes itself to avoid it.
After database migration, all you need to do is copy ALL files to a new server and make some changes to CONFIG.PHP to point phpBB to a newly created database.
Also, check permission on IMAGE folder as the scripts are uploading avatars into it…
Next, after you can confirm that the migration to a new server was succesfull, you can proceed with the application upgrade.
Here is the “official” installation/migration cookbook – http://www.phpbb.com/community/docs/INSTALL.html#convert.
Cookbook is pretty much straight-forward and you shouldn’t be having any troubles with following the steps from the application upgrade wizard.
With MediaTemple I had no errors with conversion tool as I did with GoDaddy, so I suppose has better PHP configured by default…