Friday, April 16, 2010

SMF 1.1.11 Upgrade Error: The Upgrader found some old or Outdated Language Files

Its always fun to work with free/open source software :) SMF forum software is one such thing. Every time I feel a sense of achievement; especially after my website is well indexed and experiencing a surge of visitors.

Well, after the fix as explained in my previous post, I got few calls from my forum members saying “I can’t see my Personal Messages”, “I can’t view my own profile” and so on…

I started doubting the fix and planned to do a “large upgrade”, as its no harm and any database table discrepancies would also get fixed. It was as simple as following the steps:

But while copying the new files to your forum directory, you need to be very careful and make sure all the new source files are copied properly… or else the following error is certain and the update will fail:

Upgrade Error: The Upgrader found some old or Outdated Language Files

But, in my case, the problem was little different. I had used few mods & templates that used utf-8 language dependencies. Hence, even after copying the files properly, I got the above said error. Forum Maintenance tools were very helpful here. I could easily trace that the language files *.english-utf8.php (in folder smf_1-1-11_upgrade\Themes\default\languages of the downloaded SMF upgrade package) were mismatched in version. I started looking for latest version of utf-8 version of english language, but I couldn’t find them. (Actually I had got them bundled with the theme).

I was pretty sure, I had not used any support for other languages except plain ‘english’. So, I simply made copies of language files that were part of new SMF package and renamed the file names from *.english.php to *.english-utf8.php. This fix got me going with upgrade process…

That’s not all! While upgrading, it threw a cool warning …

Updating and creating indexes...
    Updating indexes on "messages"... done.
    Updating table indexes... done.
    Reordering boards and categories... done.
    Updating indexes and data on "smileys"... Unsuccessful!

This query:

ALTER TABLE smf_smileys
ORDER BY LENGTH(code) DESC;
Caused the error:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'LENGTH(code) DESC' at line 2

This one was easy to resolve, seems like classic problem! This post was extremely helpful. Simply follow those steps if at all you get this above said “Smiley” issue.

Finally my forum is up .. but my member complaints are not yet addressed. I guessed the complaints were related to some issue with the “Permissions” in SMF forum. Yes, it was ! Somewhere in the process of error checking the database and repairing the tables, the “permissions” had somehow got ignored. Once I set all the “Permission” as I wanted them to be, the forum is UP and Running normal (I think).

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