Last Updated on December 1, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
UPDATED 9 30 13
I was trying to update a site from Joomla 2.5.14 to Joomla 3.1. This was the first attempt at an upgrade to 3.1. The first time through, the upgrade process bombed during the finalise process (Spelling as it was in the url). Unfortunately I didn’t save the exact URL where things hung.
I recovered using akeeba backup and tried again. This time I tried to turn off extensions I thought could be a problem. The upgrade crashed at the same place.
I did some more research and there appears to be some conflict between the upgrade to Joomla 3.1 and the Sh404sef library. Be sure to look for the shlib plugin as well as the sh404 plug int.
I plan on doing a lot of research and testing on this over the next couple of days.
The short take is
- Make sure you have a viable backup before attempting to upgrade to Joomla 3.1
- Plan on your site being down for a bit if things go badly.
- Check all of your extensions for compatibility. Sh404sef is a special case in that the extension rewrites Urls.
Note – I cannot be sure that the issue was with sh404sef but based on my research it appears that there is a correlation.
I tried to upgrade another site on the same VPS that was NOT running sh404sef. This indicates that the issue was NOT related to Sh404sef.
I now have to restore 2 sites as both have crashed. I found some possible clues as to the reason for the crash.
- It appears that ALL non core extensions should be disabled prior to the upgrade.
- I did not check the php verion for the VPS. It is possible that it does not meet the spec for Joomla 3 and that the upgrade process does not check the php version.
- There was some indication at http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=710&t=812445 that one needs to delete some tables if there was a failed installation.
- there was also a post at the above URL that stated that there was a problem with some upgrades where there was a prior upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6
- It may pay to do an update to j 3.0 from the extension manager and then doing the upgrade to the latest in the 3.x series.