Migrating from Jomres v3 to v4

If you are going to upgrade to v4 or v5, then I strongly suggest that you first ensure that your existing installation is at v3.4.5 first as migration hasn't been tested on older versions.
 
Installation and Upgrading via the web installer is identical to that used in v3 in that you upload the web installer to the root of your Joomla installation and run it (eg by putting http://www.mydomain.com/jomres_webinstall.php in your browser's address bar). You'll need to use the v4 specific web installer which can be downloaded via your account on http://license-server.jomres.net.
 
 
Before you start, uninstall your old Jomres modules as the modules have been rewritten to work with v4 and you'll need to reinstall them from the Jomres plugin manager. If you don't do this you'll have a fatal error after upgrading because the path to integration.php has been changed. Remember to backup the srch.html files from those modules if you've changed them.
 
When you run the web installer it will, as before, download and extract Jomres, however once it's been extracted you'll be taken direct to install_jomres.php. If you're already running v3 it will automatically perform the migration for you so please ensure that you have backed up your files and database first, in the unlikely event that something goes wrong.
 
The steps taken during the migration are as follows.
 
  1. updateRoomTypeImagePaths(); The image paths in the room types table are changed to point to /jomres/uploadedimages/rtypes
  2. updatePropertyFeaturePaths(); The image paths in the property feature table are changed to point to /jomres/uploadedimages/rtypes
  3. copyImagesToNewPath(); The files previously in /images/stories/jomres are copied to /jomres/uploaded images
  4. removepreV4JomresFiles(); This is very important for you to know. The files and folders in /administrator/components/com_jomres and /components/com_jomres are completely removed, so any plugins you previously had installed will be lost (except for the basic templates plugins, and I'll get to that in a moment) as some have been integrated into the system and some haven't yet been rewritten to work in v4.
  5. reinstallJomresJoomlaFiles(); The new v4 Joomla to Jomres bridge files are put into the /administrator/components/com_jomres and /components/com_jomres folders.
  6. addNewTables(); This adds some tables that are new to v4, and some that might not have been installed previously if you did not have X Y or Z plugins installed previously.
  7. alterTables(); Modifying the v3 tables to work with v4.
  8. dropOldTables(); The tables dropped are: _jomres_tmpguests, _jomres_tmpbooking, _jomres_property_images, _jomres_tempBookingOut and __jomres_cancellations. You may or may not have some of these tables, depending on when you first installed Jomres so it will probably not matter to you, but if you have put something in those tables that you want to keep, now's the time to back it up.
  9. resetMRConfigSettings(); Some config settings need to reset to a known baseline. This is mainly to do with the composite property details being set to the default in Jomres.
  10. resetJRConfigSettings(); As above.
  11. insertNewJRConfigSettings(); This mainly refers to the Integrated Search feature, but it also adds a couple of new settings.
  12. insertPluginSettings(); Inserts settings for pseudocron and the backend paypal settings if they aren't already set.
  13. updateRatesTimestamps(); All rates (tariffs) tables have a valid to and from timestamp column added and this function updates those columns.
  14. doTableUpdates(); This is called any time an update is performed, it's used whenever you're updating from a previous version of v3.
 
 
I strongly advise you to study these steps before attempting to migrate from v3 to v4. If you've made any changes to your system it's possible that one or more of these steps will impact your Jomres installation so make sure you understand what's being done so that you can prepare before-hand.
 
As I mentioned, the basic templates plugins folder will not be removed, but the migration will not continue until it has been uninstalled. This is because there are many many changes to the Jomres templates and the introduction of the backend template editing makes it redundant so if you have customised the template overrides, I suggest that you make a backup of them before using the Joomla component installer to uninstall that plugin.
 
 
This document is copyright Vince Wooll/Woollyinwales IT, 2011. All rights reserved.