Upgrade from 5.1.6 to 9

[Eric Soroos]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002 12:43:58 +0200 in message <a05100304b9d2eb7715aa@[192.168.1.9]>, nate at int-res.com wrote:
> Hello,
> Has any body ever upgraded from 5.x to 9? I think it will probably be 
> a colossal amount of work, but I have no idea where to start. Can 
> someone please give me a clue as to where to begin? What sort of 
> inner workings of my database need to be changed in order to be 
> supported by 9?

I think it's going to be best to start with a new system set up (at the correct path) with manila and then merge in your old tools. Trying to merge userland's changes into your existing setup is going to be troublesome. whatever you do, it's probably going to be an iterative process.

Back everything up.

Locate your important prefs in you 5.1.6 databases, most likely they're all over user.*, but mainly user.prefs user.websites, and user.html.  Export them in .fttb format, you may want to use the batch exporter.

back everything up. ;>

At some point in the past there was a slight change in the db format (6.1 era) that _may_ make it a one way trip for your databases. New versions will open old roots, but I can't be 100% sure of the reverse. I'm pretty sure that you can drop an frontier9 app into the frontier 5 folder and start everything up if you have to. But I'd rather have the backups. 

I believe that 5.16 had guest databases.  If you have any GDBS, copy them over to the new installation folder, open them and add them to user.databases.
  
> This question will come later of course:
> How do I make an old site created in pre-Manila 5.1.6 accessable by 
> Manila once I pull a copy of my present database into my new Frontier 
> and get it working?
> I've tried searching the archives here but I don't know if any of 
> what I found pertains to my problem.

Depends on the type of site. (static, .wsf, .fcgi, or mainresponder), It may be a whole site rebuilding experience, which is a little more complex than I can go into in email, or you may just want to keep the old bits running and add new info in a manila site.  I've got one site that was originally written for the .fcgi framework and static rendering (4.2.3 era) now running happily on frontier 8 behind apache (fcgi/static) and manila (editing of new content).   

eric