A Guide to Upgrading Customized Sites

This guide is for those who have customized their MDPro sites and do not wish to lose those changes upon upgrading. Those changes could be anything from custom icons and other images to code changes. The standard upgrade method is sure to wipe out some or all of those customizations. The methods below have been designed to preserve your efforts in customizing your site.

Preparation

First of all, you should have your changes documented. Our Tips page mentions this very important step. If you have custom images such as topic icons, you should have a separate zipped package of them for safekeeping.

Next, open the upgrade package on your local computer. If you have any code changes on your list, make them in the upgrade package unless they have already been integrated or there are substantial code changes (such as from MDP 1.072 to MDP 1.1). Delete any images that would replace the custom ones on your site.

Check your list twice or as many times as necessary in order to be sure you made all the requisite changes when appropriate.

Uploading files

Once you have reviewed and revised the upgrade package, you upload the new files to your server. Alternately, you may compress them (using Winzip or some other compression utility program) upload the entire compressed package, and uncompress it on the server.

You might want to preserve the old directories and files by renaming then, An easy way it to rename them putting a 1- in from of the name. This allows you to keep the prior version in case there is some reason you may need to revert to it.

New distributions

At times the changes in a new distribution are so extensive that there is no upgrade package and an entire distribution must be installed. In such cases we have an additional step. Follow all the steps above. Create a directory, mdp for example, and upload the entire distribution into this directory. You can perform the upgrade from this directory. Assuming all goes well and your custom changes have been retained (except where the code has changed), create a directory named mdpOLD, move your present (prior) installation into this directory and then move the contents of the mdp/ directory up to the root level. When you are satisfied that there is no longer a need for any of the files in the mdpOLD directory (such as some image files you may have forgotten about), you should delete the directory.

Hacks and other refinements

If you have any, please post them on the forums (code hacks) or submit them to the downloads sections (images). Code improvements may be included and make it easier on upgrades as they won't have to be repeated. New icons can provide alternatives to the standard set included with the distribution. MDPro has been improved by many such contributions from users.