Well, I’m in the process of upgrading my BimmerMania.com forum from the now retired phpBB 2.x line. The candidate for the upgrade in the fresh phpBB 3.0.1 release!
This latest 3.x release has been out for a little while now, but I’ve been hesitant to upgrade since I was busy with school and everything. Now that the summer break is here and I’ll be off my feet anyway for a while (surgery), I figured I’d go a head and upgrade!
The main reason that I put it off for so long is because of the customizations that I made to the original BimmerMania.com forum (header, icons, extra pages such as the downloads and links and home/intro pages). Now that I have plenty of time for tweaking and working out any bugs, I can finally upgrade! Everyone who knows me knows that I love using the latest and the greatest, hehe.
A simple break down of the process needed to upgrade is as follows:
- Backup your current phpBB 2.x database by downloading it and saving it.
- Go to phpBB.com and download the latest 3.x version from the link on the homepage (file types include zip and tar.bz2).
- Extract the archive and upload the folder to your server.
- Open your web browser and navigate to the folder that you uploaded to the server.
- To upgrade from 2.x to 3.x, you want to make a new installation first, making sure to use a different table prefix. My phpBB 2.x tables didn’t have a prefix (I removed the phpBB_ prefix from them upon installation) so I used phpBB_ which is the default.
If you are already using phpBB_ as your table prefix for phpBB 2.x then you could use something like phpBB3_ for this conversion.
- After following the new installation instructions and completing them, you’ll be prompted to either convert an existing forum (phpBB 2.x) or make the current installation live, which means the general public can see it. You want to convert and existing forum here. Just follow the directions and everything will be updated.
Your old 2.x tables will not be removed. So if anything goes wrong with the conversion, your original forum is still working fine. After the conversion, you may want to go in and remove the old table items from the 2.x build as this is not done manually.
- Next, you’ll want to edit the template and make other changes to the overall appearance of the site as you see fit before making it live.
- Once everything is working and in place, you can upload a brief and temporary under construction index.htm or index.php page while you move the contents of the phpBB3 folder to the root directory to make it live.
This can be done quickly with an ftp client by creating a folder called phpBB2 and dragging all of the contents of the root folder (except the phpBB3 folder) over the phpBB2 folder and dropping them to move them.Next, open the phpBB3 folder and select all of the contents. Now drag and drop them over the parent directory folder (it has the two dots: “..”). This will move the contents to the previous folder (should be root)
The last step is to delete or rename the temporary under construction page so that the new forum shows up live! Everything should now be converted and if you feel ready, you can delete the phpBB2 and phpBB3 folders!
Well, that’s the conversion process in a nut shell, lol. If you have any comments or suggestions then please do post them! I’m currently in the middle of the above process, but since I’m editing the theme so much…I’m going to leave the phpBB 2.x version live for a while so the site isn’t down too long. 
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How did your upgrade go? We were going to do the same upgrade this week (June 30th), and our webmaster said that you can’t get there from here and that the site tech told her that 3.x is very buggy with lots of issues.
My upgrade went great! I honestly had absolutely no problems. The site that I upgraded was also heavily modified. You can take a look if you want:
http://www.bimmermania.com
It’s not as heavily modified now as it was before, but everything is working fine with no problems at all!
Just make backups so that you can revert back if anything goes wrong and you should be perfectly fine as well! Good luck!