Does anyone know what I would need to do to upgrade my website currently running dnn3 to use dnn4?

Cheers

Adrian

Hello,

I would suggest you test upgrading in a localhost testing environment first.

If possible I would then test that DNN4 is compatible with your hosting provider & make sure you can actually operate DNN4 with your current hosting setup.

For the actual upgrade, I haven't tried this yet, but I would suggest you check out the free upgrade video as the process will be very similar. Once you have learnt the upgrade process, I would then study how to install and configure your hosting provider for DNN4. The 2 pieces of information should then help you to set this up.

The most important thing is to test this out before trying it on a live website. The other thing to bear in mind is that I have heard that DNN4 is not as stable as DNN3 yet, so do you really need to upgrade?

Hope this gives you some starting points, thanks,

Lee

Thanks for that. The reason for the updgrade is that I am a developer and I intend to develop a range of ddn modules. My live sites will be for demontration purposes only. They dont do anything at the moment but are set up as dnn3.1 and are hosted with a third party . I have decided to target dnn4 asp.net 2.0 rather than earlier versions (comments please!)

One question I am sure that you can answer is what is the best way to backup from a live site back to a development server make changes and  then promote from the development server back to the live site (not upgrading) - Is this just a SQL server operation or do I need to move files up and down etc (and do you have a tutorial) ?

Cheers

Adrian

Hi Adrian,

ok, sounds like a good plan. I've heard that ASP.NET 2.0 is much better and saves a ton of coding. - I still need to get round to experimenting with this yet, but it sounds promising. (Currently doing a lot of experimentation with pure CSS layout skins)

Regarding backup / restoration, the first thing I would do is ask your hosting provider what services they provide. - With my host, I can click on a button to backup the database, to restore the database, I place the backup file in a certain folder and then just click on the restore button in the hosting control panel. - So you could potentially create a backup database file & restore this in your SQL server on your localhost install - you will also need to download all of the files that are on your server to get an exact copy. - You can then reverse this to send the changes back (you may only need to restore the database if it is just database changes that you have made.

Another method though is to use the portal template feature which exports all of the pages and content and allows you to easily apply them to another installation. - This is a much easier way of working, but doesn't export your user accounts, it's just content based. - If you don't know about portal templates, check out video 2 of this tutorial Configuring DotNetNuke Before Installation which will give you all the info you will need.

Hope this helps, thanks,