I've used aMember for about 8 years now. My site is busy and I'm nervous about performing an in-place upgrade from 3.30. I have lots of template customizations and old deprecated files from the past 8 years of version upgrades. What should I do? (1) Is 4.1.10 stable enough for me to upgrade to it on a production website? (2) Are there major changes to the database? (3) How can I install, customize and test 4.1.10 while aMember 3.30 is being used on my busy site? For example, can I put 4.1.10 in a new directory such as /amember4, duplicate the database, perform an upgrade on the duplicate, make changes to the 4.1.10 templates, and then when everything is working fine, move /amember (3.30) to /amember-old and move to /amember4 to /amember ? (4) If this above plan would work, what about transactions that happen while I'm testing 4.1.10? Once I'm done all my customizations, I'd need to blow away the test database and then import the real production 3.30 database, and upgrade it. I can't risk a service outage. (5) If none of these are recommended, I might be stuck with doing a clean install of 4.1.10, testing it and customizing it, and then merging all the files into my existing /amember directory, performing the upgrade on a production server, and hoping for the best. I really don't want to do this, however. Thanks, Kelly
Kelly 1. This depends on yoru current configuration. what payment systems do you use ? Do you have recurring billing enabled? 2. Yes it was completly rewrien: http://www.amember.com/docs/Migration_from_legacy_aMember_Pro_v3 3. Sure this is a good plan. You can install aMember4 into separate folder without a problem.
Hi Alex, Thanks for the response. I'm using only the Beanstream payment system, with no recurring billings. Is this a good candidate? The document you linked to is quite useful, I'll start running some tests this weekend and let you know how it goes. With many active members, most important to me is to ensure their information get imported correctly, and the end-of-subscription notices get sent out so they can renew when the time comes. The interface in version 4 looks so much better, I'd really like to upgrade the production site to it assuming the tests go well. Kelly
Unfortunately there is no plugin for beanstream yet. When plugin become available, import will be easy.
Just following up... I hope you can build the plugin for Beanstream soon. Until then I have to stick with 3.x. thanks, Kelly
I would really like to upgrade from v.3 to v.4. I currently use phpBB3, wordpress (single login for these) and paypal with recurring payments. I only have 35 members at this time and the majority are free. Before I make some changes to the site and start heavily promoting it, I would like to make this upgrade. I have been reading threads and am unclear about potential issues. Any recommendations?