MyBB Community Forums

Around 5 years ago i installed v1.6.17 on my host, and after soing some mods, and defeating the spammers I let it as is.
As in no updates.

Everything had been going fine, until the other day when my site went down.

Contacted my host, and resolved the problem:

My version of mybb was using PHP 5.2 and the host had switched to 5.7.

They put my site back on 5.2, and it works now.

BUT I was told that in a few months PHP 5.2 would be totally gone.

So, as it stands I need to update to v1.8.25 which seems to work fine locally with PHP 5.7 on XAMPP with a fresh blank install.

So, the question is how to update my real site on the remote host without losing data?

Are you sure on the PHP version there? There was a 5.6, and a 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 and 7.4, but PHP 5.7 doesn't exist. There is MySQL 5.7, though.

Either way, there's an upgrade guide here: https://docs.mybb.com/1.8/install/upgrade/

Short version if you'll need to back up your files and database, upload the new files over the old files, and run the upgrade script at ./install/upgrade.php

Plugins will need to be disabled and updating to new versions, and your theme will need updating too.

The PHP version is after all, pretty ancient. Circa 2005.

This is going to be a project, as I depend on a bunch of plugins particularly for security.
Hopefully there are newer versions of the old!

I apparently need to test this locally. Not a problem with Win.
Is this a problem? In OSCommerce I was able to update ftom win with only a few permissions problems.
No clue about mybb.
I can do it in Linux, but may have to wait a while till I reinstaall that system. A VM is doable, but clunky.

BTW - many thanks for the instructions