United Cavers Exploration Team Test

A minor software update has been released which updates the SMF from the current 2.1.6 to 2.1.7.
The update is mainly security and bug fixes.

Past experience has shown, despite the published blurb, that this is not a simple '1 click' operation and so I am in the process of testing the update on a separate server using a recent dump of the production website. I hope to complete this in the next few days. Once I am happy this will work OK then I will schedule downtime on the UCET website to rebuild and reload it - this will take about 1/2 day.

I will announce the upgrade date a few days before it takes place.

Cheers,
Dave

Just to provide an update on timescales on forum maintenance.

I had hoped to do the update this weekend, but extensive testing on a backup system showed a problem in updating that caused the format of the website was completely screwed up and I have been working to identify the cause.

I saw this issue during an attempted in-situ update from 2.1.4 -> 2.1.6 but fixed it by a full clean install followed by restoring parts of the database. Everything seemed to work OK and we have been running OK since. Doing a full clean reinstall is a tedious activity as there are a lot of steps followed by restoring some of the database tables from the production system. With the previous successful update I only restored the members, main forum board files, topics and messages ( about 9 tables) and had no problems - the website came up OK.

This time I tried to do the same on the test system, but realised there were quite a few more database files which needed to be restored (about 22) as we are using more facilities of the forum and I had missed a few others. Restoring these blew up the formatting of the forum pages... After a lot of rollbacks and database reloads I have found that the 'themes' table causes the problem. This contains user preferences for location, gender, social media links etc. I didn't copy this on the previous update and so everything on the forum was OK.

It least I now know how to avoid the problem and I will try to identify the exact cause and a fix so that people keep their settings. Once this is done I will probably go through a full clean install again as that way we clear out any cruft.   

So currently I will pencil in the update to be on Sat 11th April - the forum will be unavailable from 08.00 till at least 12.00

Dave