[TYPO3-english] Advice needed for creating a new version of an existing website

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 28/03/2015 13:55, Mattia B wrote:
> Looks like I was successful at updating to 4.5 (of which I'm keeping a
> backup version of the codebase and database).

Make sure the database, every table and every column is utf8_general_ci 
(this is the best working setting for TYPO3). If you need a small tool 
to access the database take a look at http://www.adminer.org (there is 
also a TYPO3 extension which contains that tool in a BE module). 6.2 
requires the entire BE and DB to be UTF-8.
I had a quick look in smoothmigration and noticed that the UTF-8 
conversion was incomplete and probably doesn't handle most problems 
(I've seen a lot of databases where UTF-8 encoded text was stored in 
Latin-1 columns/tables, resulting in strings like 'Ali Gökgöz and 
Gültekin Tarcan'.

> After that I have made several attempts at upgrading to 6.2
> (smoothmigration, db reindexing, encoding conversion and so on) but all
> failed probably because a lot of extensions are old/unavailable and/or
> have modified files which give problems with the updates.

If you run the 6.2 Install Tool as standalone tool (not from the TYPO3 
Backend) it should work even if extensions break the backend. In case of 
errors it will suggest to unload an extension. There is also a check 
that loads the files of each extension like normally happens in the 
backend. If an extension causes a fatal error you will get the 
opportunity to unload it.

As said in my previous post, most of the fatal PHP errors you will see 
with older extensions are cause because they don't rely on the 
autoloader that was introduced in TYPO3 4.3. From that release you 
didn't need to use require(_once) to load core classes anymore. The fix 
for these fatal errors is simply removing the line.
Other require_once() statements use the constant PATH_tslib which was 
removed in 6.x; but the require_once wasn't needed anyway, so you can 
safely remove the line.

Some of the TypoScript in older installations/extensions use the HTML 
object. In 99.9% of the cases this can simply be replaced by the TEXT 
object (these were so similar that it wasn't necessary to keep them 
both). Lines like:

10 = HTML
10 {

can be replaced with

10 = TEXT
10 {

> Sounds very much like I'd better start from scratch and reimplement all
> the stuff. Looks like a long and painful journey.. and I'll need a lot
> of help :)
> I'll make a couple more attempts at updating it and then decide which
> path to follow..

Building everything from scratch is also quite a task. Of course you 
have the opportunity to build the pages with Fluid templates, nice and 
shiny extensions made with extbase, but migrating the content would 
still form a real challenge.


-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 CMS Active Contributor

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: typo3.org