Despite my apparent lack of activity, I've been doing quite a bit of work for WFG lately. Our messaging board system and some other parts of our website run on the Invision Power Board version 2. We'd happily keep chugging along, but IBP2 is no longer supported, so we have to move to IPB3 in order to keep getting updates and new features. Since it's a fairly large forum (more than 200,000 posts), I thought that I'd take the opportunity to write about it.
Process
The process for upgrading wasn't that bad. All I had to do was to upload some new files, run upgrade.php, and then log into the admin panel and rebuild the posts. Done! Granted, the process took a while (rebuilding posts take a lot of DB time), but it didn't require that much effort.
Benefits
I don't mean to sound like a sales pitch, but there were some very good reasons for upgrading:
- Updates. IPB2 was no longer maintained, so we weren't getting security updates.
- Spam control. IPB2 didn't have any built-in measures for controlling spam, but v3 does.
- Ban-hammer. IPB3 makes it much easier to patrol the forums and to remove offensive posts or to warn users.
- Editors. The new version has a much nicer post editor.
Experience
The upgrade was pretty easy...just upload a few files, run a PHP script, and wa-la! Easy.
Kind of.
The version of the package that I was given, 3.1.3, contains an error. The error was found by one of our developers, Ykkrosh (Phillip):
Assuming this is about the formatting buttons in the post interface, it looks like it fails when it tries processing the "ed-0_palette_otherstyles_img center" element, because that name contains a space and so it breaks the selector passed to querySelectorAll since they don't escape it properly ('#ed-0_palette_otherstyles_img center input[type="submit"]'). (I have no idea why they mess around with id selectors instead of just calling Element.querySelectorAll directly). Given they have lots of different selector implementations and it might take effort to fix bugs in all of them, I guess the safer solution is to get rid of the "img center" and "img left" etc custom BBcodes, since I think we only use them for aligning images in the site content pages (which don't use this forum any more).
This error caused all kinds of headaches. The WYSIWYG editor for adding and editing posts would display HTML tags instead of formatting the text for you. If you were leaving a reply, it would also clear the text field if the field lost and then regained focus. What a pain!
BUT -- Everything post-upgrade has been pretty awesome. We now have a new theme, a "portal," and a few other nice features. Over all, it's been a great success!
The Moar You Know
So, what did I take away from this? A few things:
- You can never test enough. I ran through several test upgrades on my hosting account to make sure that nothing was broken and identified a few configuration bugs. Some of the other team members even submitted bug reports, which made me feel good -- I'd rather find stuff in testing than after deployment. Yet, somehow we all neglected to actually try to post :p. There were some simple and crucial tests that I could have run to prevent the few days of headaches that I ended up causing our forum users.
- I could have saved a lot of time by performing the upgrade on a local machine instead of a shared host. As I said earlier in the post, part of the upgrade requires rebuilding the posts, which means that all 200,000+ posts have to be read and processed. My shared host took several hours to do this, partly because there are CPU limits on my account and because I'm competing for resources. It probably would have been smarter to run the upgrade on one of my local machines and then to upload the results to my host.
- Janitorial work is important. Some of the headaches that I encountered during my upgrade process came from obscure database and directory names. To make matters worse, I didn't clean things out. If I spend some time playing website janitor for a bit, I'll probably be able to avoid most of those headaches next time we do a major upgrade. Since we have a new website in the works, I have an opportunity to apply this lesson now-ish.
Thanks
I owe a big thanks to the following people, in no particular order:
- k776 (Kieran): Thank you so much for staying on IRC with me during the upgrade! Having someone to talk to during the process made the whole thing go quicker. Having a second set of eyes and someone who could assist me was a huge help and motivator.
- Ykkrosh (Phillip): You solved the most crucial bug in the upgrade. You rock!
- Jeru (Aviv): Thanks for helping out with testing and steering the process. Thanks for being so dedicated.
- Wijitmaker (Jason): Every time I needed something from IPB, you were there to supply it. I never had to wait for support from you -- you were "just there" with a reply in an instant. Thanks for being so responsive.
- feneur (Erik): You've always been there when I needed input and to provide encouragement and praise. Thanks for making me feel like part of the team.
- The rest of the WFG team and our users: Thank you all so much for your patience, persistence, and feedback.
Onto beta 4 and our new website!
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