Written by: Tobias (Keylinx)
Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:14:35 GMT

So the goal is to have this site running 4.8 of DotNetNuke within a week or two. The first attempt I did was to do the upgrade in one step 4.5 -> 4.8 (yes I am lazy ). That did not work for some reason. So I quickly restored my backup and went back to upgrading one version at a time. Actually it should work to do the one step upgrade, however doing it this way may teach me one or two thing about upgrading DNN on the way.

There is some problems that can be easily solved if you know what you are doing, this is how I should have done it, but for some reason did not.

1.  Do a backup of your DNN folder on the web site. You will definitly be needing that. God knows what files that may be misplaced on the way.
2. When you're at it, do a backup of your database as well. You never know what happens to it, when the evil sql-scripts of the DNN upgrade starts to shred your little tables filled with lovely data for your site.
3. Ok that was trivial, then start up winzip or some other extractor tool of your choice. Use the upgrade version from DotNetNuke download area and point it to extract in your DNN folder on the web server. Say 'yes to all' for every file it wants to replace.
4. Now go to the DNN folder, rename release.config to web.config
5. Open up the web.config and your old web.config in the backup folder (from step 1).
6. In my case there were three important things to copy from the old web.config
   i) The section. If not then you will not be able to run the upgrade, instead DNN will assume that you are doing a clean install and send you to the InstallWizard. 
   ii) The key "SiteSqlServer" from the section. If not then some modules won't work. For instance in my case, I noticed that Blog module and Users Online module stopped working.
   iii) Finally the section filed under the section in the config file is good to copy. If you don't do it. The user login function will not work, since password hashing is based upon the keys provided here.
7. Browse in to your DNN installation using your web browser (I was using http://localhost/dnn at that time, but using the normal url will hopefully work too). The DNN starts to execute the upgrade scripts. Once done, your portal is now using 4.6.2. Enjoy!

Well that was it for this time. Hope this short step-by-step list will help you out.

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