Recently I had the “pleasure” of upgrading from CMSMS 1.9.3 to 1.10.3.

• Downloaded the cmsmadesimple-1.10.3-full.tar.gz
• Unzipped it overwriting some of the existing files from the older version (1.9.3) [tar -xvf cmsmadesimple-1.10.3-full.tar.gz -C my_existing_site_installation_folder]
• Ran the upgrade script by opening http://my-site.com/install/upgrade.php

I was constantly getting stuck at step 3, it was complaining:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method cms_config :: save () in /install/lib/classes/CMSUpgradePage3.class.php on line 30

Digging around a little bit realized cms_config is no longer available.

Then tried downloading cmsmadesimple-1.9.4.3-full.tar.gz

Luckily this time I was able to go past step 3 without any problem.

So now I was on version 1.9.4.3, but I wanted to get to 1.10.3. So

• As per their advice, upgraded all my modules to the latest version
• Downloaded cmsmadesimple-1.10.3-full.tar.gz,
• Copied its contents
• Tried to run the upgrade script.

Everything went fine, it even updated my database scheme to version 35 successfully. But then when I hit continue on step 6, it was stuck there for ever. Eventually came back with Internal Error 500. Looking at the log file, all I could see is

“2012/07/28 06:28:35 [error] 23816#0: *3319000 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream”

Turns out that in 1.10, the CMSMS dev team broke a whole bunch of backward compatibility. In Step 6 of the upgrade, it tries to upgrade and install installed modules. But during this process it just conks out.

Then I tried to uninstall all my modules and run the upgrade script. Abra-kadabra the upgrade went just fine.

• Then I had to go in and install those modules again.
• Also had to update most of the modules to the latest version which is compatible with 1.10.
• And restore the data used by the modules.

Only had I known all of this, it could have saved me a few hours of my precious life.

P.S: Just when I finished all of this, I saw the CMSMS dev team released the latest stable version 1.11

I really like CMS Made Simple. Its pretty neat if you want to set up a website using a CMS software.

However, after being hacked last week, I just tried upgrading to the latest version (1.9.4) of CMS Made Simple. I was happy to see the upgrade script ran fine and everything seemed to work. However there were couple of things that were broken.

I’m documenting them here, hoping it might be useful to others.

1) The old config.php file contained the following property

#If you're using the internal pretty url mechanism or mod_rewrite, would you like to
#show urls in their hierarchy?  (ex. http://www.mysite.com/parent/parent/childpage)
$config['use_hierarchy'] = true;

However in the latest version, when they migrate the old version of config.php, this property is dropped.

Some plugins like Blogs Made Simple rely on this property for creating pretty URLs for RSS feeds.

2) We’ve written some code which looks up the current page id in the $gCms variable.

We had used the following code to figure out the page id:

$smarty->_tpl_vars['gCms']->variables['page_id'])

However in the latest version of CMSMS this does not work. Instead had to change it to:

$smarty->_tpl_vars['page_id'])