XF 1.1 Best way to upgrade/import?

[dehness]

Hey guys,

So our setup is that we're currently running XF1.1 on the live forum. We also have a dev site (password protected) running XF1.4.

The live site is full of custom code, add-ons and changes to create the forum that suits our community, and therefore we decided redeveloping the forum from scratch would be easier than trying to fix all the changes we've made over the years after updating.

Now that the dev site is basically finished, I'm trying to decide on the best way of doing this.

I was thinking,

1. Close the live site to members so no posts are lost,
   
2. Clone the current site/database and update the clone to 1.4 (as I know you can't import 1.1 databases to 1.4),
3. Clone the dev site and link it to the new 1.4 database from the live site,
4. Import the database maintaining original thread/user assignations.

Does anyone have a better or easier way of doing it?

Also, we have been creating members/threads on the dev site, so will unlinking the database clear those posts/members or will I have to take extra steps there to make it a clean site before importing the live database?

 

[Mike]

I'm not totally clear on why you're not willing/able to do an upgrade? That will be much faster than that whole process. If most of your changes relate to styling/add-ons, then you can prepare that beforehand and simply import it as needed. (Or if there are DB changes, prepare a scripts to run to undo or change what you've done to fit your new needs.)

I'm also not clear about what "linking" is referring to.