please take a look at the installation guide @ http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Support/Documentation/DownloadableFiles/tabid/478/Default.aspx ,also http://www.mitchelsellers.com/blogs/top-10-lists.aspx is a good resource

Cathal

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Buy the new Professional DNN7: Open Source .NET CMS Platform book Amazon US

I just successfully upgraded a DNN 3.1.1 site on shared hosting to DNN 4.09.02 with much fear and trembling but with surprisingly few problems. Mitchel Sellers outlines his recommended sequence and steps in this blog post - note particularly his last entry in the comments to the blog:

http://www.mitchelsellers.com/blogs/articletype/articleview/articleid/106/upgrading-dnn-3x-to-dnn-4x.aspx

which is what I followed but which differs a bit from Sebastian's recommended sequence.

Here are a few tips based on my experience:

• If you are using third party modules, make sure that an upgrade path is available from those modules' vendors.
• Make backups of the site's physical structure and database initially and create a mirror of the site locally to use to test the entire sequence of upgrades before applying them to the actual site.
• After you have make your first set of backups, remove all installed but unused modules from the site. Do not have any modules (other than Html/Text) installed on your site's home page - especially if you susupect that module might cause an issue when upgrading to the next version in the sequence.
• Don't forget that for upgrades from versions prior to DNN 4.06.02, you must manually transfer connection string(s), machine keys, objectQualifier and databaseOwner settings from the prior version web.config to the new version.
• Make a complete folder/file backup and database backup before going on to the next upgrade in the sequence.
• After successfully upgrading to DNN 3.3.7, don't forget to change the ASP.Net app pool from 1.1 to 2.0.
• If you receive any SqlDataProvider errors, check the indicated log for the cause, investigate if that error was a known issue for the version and make the decision whether to manually re-run the portion of the script which errored, manually correct the problem in a database query, or ignore it. Following Mitchel's sequence I had only 3 SqlDataProvider script errors, two of which I decided to ignore and one of which I corrected but later found I could have also ignored.
• Most of the more serious errors will be due to core or third-party modules. You may find that you will need to delete the problem module's dll or an obsolete core provider or HttpHandler dll (one or more) from the bin should you find that the site will not come up after a version upgrade. In the one case that happened (in the upgrade to 3.3.7), I checked the EventLog table in the DB, saw that I was getting a failure in creating an instance of a type and recalled that I had to remove the DNNSQLMembershipProvider.dll, DNNSQLProfileProvider.dll, and DNNSQLRoleProvider.dll as that was when there were major changed in DNN's Membership, Profile, and Role implementations.
• After I had successfully upgraded the local test site, I was tempted to just clear out the files on the shared host, FTP the physical folders/files from the local test site back to the shared host, and restore the test database to the server on the shared host but knowing that I had run into problems restoring databases to that particular web host, repeated each step on the actual site - applying what I had learned from having first done the test upgrades and remembering to make backups between each actual site DNN version and modules upgrade.

I had only one of my own custom modules fail in the upgrade which I had anticipated anyway due to the changes in DNN Membership and Role implementation. That module I then upgraded to a new 4.x version which I had previously prepared and separately tested. I also found that the old 2.x skin used on the old site did not behave well in 4.x so changed skins rather than spending any time tracking down its problems.

BTW - you first step is also most important! Let me know if you run into specific problems along the way.

 

 

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Bill, WESNet Designs
Team Lead - DotNetNuke Gallery Module Project (Not Actively Being Developed)
Extensions Forge Projects . . .
Current: UserExport, ContentDeJour, ePrayer, DNN NewsTicker, By Invitation
Coming Soon: FRBO-For Rent By Owner