Geeklog Forums

I know you folks do not support GL installed/upgraded by Fantastico. I did not realize this until long after my site was up with content. I am willing to do footwork and I'm sure there are other GL users who are similarly screwed. If I find a solution I would like to post it here.

I have a mostly functional GL 1.4.1 site. I thought it was fully functional until I tried to upgrade to 1.5.1. This failed with theme errors (fixable) but then database errors and lots of broken functionality.

Restoring my GL 1.4.1 site from backup and after getting feedback from one of my site users about missing RSS feeds, I noticed that issues must have been introduced during a previous upgrade _to_ GL 1.4.1 from a prior version. Missing features include Content Syndication (no admin component and GL not creating RSS feed data), bulk delete of user submissions does not work, etc.

So two questions:

1. I am wondering if re-applying a modified version of the install scripts from previous versions might give me the missing stuff that Fantastico botched. Based on the version history, I would try to re-install each of these versions:

geeklog-1.3.9sr2
geeklog-1.4.1
geeklog-1.5.1

I started reading through the install script but see there is some logic in there to determine the current version, etc. I'd have to get around that and could be a huge can of worms. Is it worth it?



2. Alternatively, I have a mostly ok geeklog 1.4.1 database and I'd like to preserve the content. What is the best way to import this data (just stories and links to images?) into a fresh 1.5.1 install?

I tried doing this once by running mysql to load the 1.5.1 database with 1.4.1 content. That didn't work, I think something about duplicate keys.


Sorry, I didn't start taking notes with actual error messages until recently and the last time I looked at this stuff was late 2008.

Thant`s an interesting question. Probably I`d take the old backup and change the MySQL structure to that of a new install. As long as you have backups you can try...

I did fix this a few months ago although it took a fair amount of work.

First thing I did was to do a clean GL install. Then I took mysqldump every time I saved a change to this vanilla site, performing the various basic setup tasks like adding new users, topics, and stories. This helped me map the schema so I knew which tables/columns were required and updated by the code. Thank you, Geeklog, for having a sane database schema.

Use 'mysqldump --skip-extended-insert' to get a more human-readable dump file.

I used Linux diff to compare old and new dump files.

Using this method, I could determine which parts of the schema were missing from the old (broken) database dump. A few tables in the old database were missing columns so I just manually edited a dump.sql file to populate it with the required columns and dummy data.

It took a few tries to get it right but eventually I had a working site again and was able to update to the latest version of GL.


Fantastico is great to test-drive software, but I'll never use it for anything "real" again.

I actually went looking at other CMS/Blog software again when I saw how tedious it was going to be to fix the broken site. I came back to Geeklog because it does exactly what I need and does it well. It was worth the effort to fix my site and stay with my favorite CMS!