Upgrading from 1.1.9 to 2.1.4

Hello,

I am a student tech working at Colorado State University, for the Housing and Dining Technology Services department, and I work with the networking staff.

We use FOSWiki for all our documentation, info, keeping track of switches and building layouts, etc.

I have not been working here very long, however after speaking with full time staff who have worked here since we migrated from TWiki to FOSWiki 1.1.9, there have been some inherent issues with our wiki.

Upon looking for possible alternives to FOSWiki, I noticed that we are running on version 1.1.9, from 2013. Needless to say that is quite out of date considering the newest release was three weeks ago.

I was hoping for some instructions on how to migrate our server / site to the newest version with the least amount of chaos. I saw the UpgradeGuide and handed that off to a senior sys admin who works primarily with our servers, and he is taking a look at it.

Hopefully this will be less painful than we are thinking, and any help / tips for preventing things from breaking would be most appreciated.

Thanks,

Jack Searl

Also as a side note, we primarily use tables for much of our documentation, are there any recommendations for making these easier to use, or possible plugins?

-- CSUNetworkingTech - 27 Jun 2017

For an older site, I recommend using the CharsetConverterContrib to do the conversion. The bulk_copy utility is slow with large histories, and will skip pub files that are not attached correctly and visible to the API. CharsetConverterContrib works at the file system level.

Before you start, it's best if your target system is running a very recent perl. At least 5.20, preferably newer. See SystemRequirements. RedHat / Centos generally have the oldest perl and the most trouble with dependencies. Ubuntu and Debian are in better shape. There are "hidden" lists in that topic for most of the popular distributions of the required dependencies, so click to reveal your chosen OS. Foswiki 2.x does not ship with any bundled CPAN. Note that Foswiki 1.x won't run on the newest perl.

Generally I recommend the following steps.

• Set up the new server with latest perl you can get. Ensure all dependencies are installed.
• Install & configure Foswiki 2.1.4
• Install and configure any additional extensions. Install CharsetConverterContrib
• Migrate data. (You must not migrate the System web from the old installation, and must not "convert" it)
  • Copy the webs (except for System) from the data/ and pub/ directories into the new installation.
• For each web: Inspect for any encoding issues. (the -i option). And we recommend using cp-1252, as that's what most windows users end up cut/pasting into the editor.

  cd tools
  ./convert_charset.pl -i -encoding=cp-1252 -web=Someweb
  

  • If it looks clean, make the conversion:

            ./convert_charset.pl -encoding=cp-1252 -web=Someweb
    

  • Convert topic setting from empty DENY* rules into ALLOW * rules

            ./convertTopicSettings.pl -fixdeny -update -verbose Someweb
    

• Unfortunately we don't have a converter for the .htpasswd file. If you are using .htpasswd authentication, you'll need to check for any WikiNames that were using non-ASCII characters and convert them to UTF-8

There is a lot more information in Utf8MigrationConsiderations

-- GeorgeClark - 27 Jun 2017

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