MyBB Community Forums

I was busy for two days now upgrading my 1.6.16 forum to 1.8.3. 
A normal upgrade did work but completely destroys the layout of the forum which is pretty standard.  Al text is centered in the middle, the pictures / icons do not work and the header containing navigation to usercp, modcp, admncp and the logo is not looking good. Even after disabling all themes but default / standard it did not work for me. So I made a backup of a 1.8.3 converted database, installed a new instance of 1.8.3 forum and used the merge tool . The result is in the picture attached. I followed the instructions on the site during conversion and merge. The merge looks like:

[attachment=33242]

So what went wrong ?  I 'm stuck.  I tried different times and used UTF-8 and CP1251 for the database, no difference. I tried php 5.5 and 5.4 but no difference. The admin panel looks fine.

have you deactivated the plugins before upgrading ? if gzip compression enabled then disable and check.

also run file verification tool available at tools & maintenance section of admin panel. most of files
might appear as changed. you have to replace all such reported files from MyBB source files package.

I deactivated the plugins like the instructions told me to. The file verification was executed and reported only files missing in the install directory, no other problems.  The adminpanel does work on this installation.  I'm not sure I can switch off gzip compression on this (shared) host.

I will look into that.  I added 'rewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [NS,E=no-gzip:1,E=dont-vary:1] ' to my .htaccess . Same result. 

if gzip is enabled through forum admin panel then disable it.

admin panel >> configuration >> settings >> Server and Optimization Options >> Use GZip Page Compression?

I do not have such a setting in my admin panel. I am using hostinger.nl as my provider for shared hosting.

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I think I am going to setup a test environment on my machine here. Let's see what's happening.

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Oh well, I can see the pages now but it seems the whole site is not usable. I cannot navigate to forums (not found) and the admin panel only shows the starting page. I will try a conversion on my local server.

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Here are the results of the local upgrade, it is consistent with the remote (live) situation

Before: 

[attachment=33251]


After:

[attachment=33252]

I'm not very happy with this result. 

It looks like you are using the default theme, but can you check if there are any templates requiring updating? You can find it in the templates in ACP - Templates Sets / Find Updated templates.

If you find any templates listed there then revert them. That might help.

Thank you !! 

That was it , I had to revert several templates. 

[attachment=33255]

however it would be better to install a good looking theme compatible with MyBB 1.8.x and use it
http://community.mybb.com/mods.php?actio...ory=themes

That is true .m. I always like to keep a copy of the default theme though; it makes it much easier to check where changes are occuring or for installing plugins requiring template changes where the match is missing in a custom theme.

I already installed some themes on the test environment and they appear to be working (except the import function does not import the images, had to correct that by hand) .

Thanks to both of you I will be able to install / upgrade to 1.8.3 .