Your instructions say not to skip upgrades, but I'm uncertain what constitutes a skip... from 1.3 to 1.4 or from 1.3.1 to 1.3.2 or from 1.3.1.1 to 1.3.1.2 (in which case I would be upgrading all night perhaps...)

Do you suggest not upgrading from 1.3.1.2 to 1.4.1.6?

Thanks!

It should work in one go.
Ofcourse be sure to backup your database before you start.

The instructions mean not to skip from say 1.4.1 to 1.4.3. The fourth digit is not considered a "release" in this sense. We do try to make the upgrades work even with a skip, but we cannot test all combinations of upgrades, thus the warning.

Thanks, also your instructions recommend php 5.3. I contacted Bluehost and they said,

Currently, all but a few of our servers are using php 5.2.17. We do have some php 5.3 servers that are in a pre-release beta phase that we have some customers on that our admins are in the process of patching and stabilizing when bugs are encountered. If you need to have php 5.3 in order to run the software you're using and you don't mind being on a Beta/Development server we can forward a ticket over to our Migrations team to see if they have any that are available that you can be moved to. If not they will be rolling out 5.3 on more servers in the future once they've ironed out some of the more common bugs and 5.3 should eventually be installed on most if not all the servers at some point although we don't know how long that may take (could be months).

Do you suggest I wait until we get 5.3 to upgrade Zenphoto? I'm just a little worried about the security issues, otherwise I probably wouldn't have gone through the headache of upgrading and fixing my custom themes with the new version.

Thanks.

Zenphoto should run fine on PHP 5.2.17 although I am locally do work on 5.3 (to be future save).

in follow-up,
I upgraded from 1.3.1.2 to 1.4.1.6 with no issues except having to reset file permissions. I had installed with simplescripts but I upgraded using the normal method and had no problems, even with my custom theme.

The last time I tried to upgrade, my custom theme didn't work and I had to do programming modifications-- did improvements since 1.4.0 make this possible or maybe it's just that I didn't do much (if anything) in the way of programming modifications for this one? But that shouldn't matter since the basic structure of the album.php etc was changed as I recall, and upgrading doesn't touch those files in custom themes does it? I'm using modified effervescence theme.

How much you have to change on a custom theme on upgrade depends on the theme. The more sophisitcated you for example use the object model the more you may need to update things.
Eff+ is a standard theme but also quite complex with its different personalities.

The most things from 1.3.x to 1.4.x that changed (note this is a bigger jump than 1.4.1 to 1.4.2) were related to the script loading on the theme as we switched to use filters. Those provide more flexibility.

It is also possible that your theme still uses deprecated functions. There is a plugin which provides for those old functions so that themes can keep running. However, there should be error entries for the functions used which have been deprecated. Also, you can disable the plugin and see if the theme throws errors. I think one of the changes is that we do enable the deprecated functions plugin during setup if there are custom themes present.

Makes sense, thanks for all the info.

Unfortunately my main, most changed site has issues. I tried the manual install and the theme looked absolutely messed up and nothing like it was... at least it loaded though.

So I tried upgrading with Simple Scripts just to see what it would say and it gives this error:

Missing a Critical File
Unfortunately, one or more files required for this script to run were not found on your hosting account. This may mean the installation no longer exists, or has become corrupt, or perhaps you are running a version earlier than those we support. Rather than working with a corrupt/missing installation, you may want to start from scratch.
Show Debug (beta)
[01 Dec 00:18] Testing "public_html": success.
[+0.543s] Looking for public_html
[+0.001s] SimpleScripts system requirements passed.
[+0.004s] Import utility successfully uploaded.
[+0.038s] Response from http://mysitecreations.com/ss_499889_fiQU_import.php?s=1: status:198|file:[I removed]/zp-data/zp-config.php
[+0.000s] Refresh Failed: status:198|file:[I removed]zp-data/zp-config.php

Any ideas what that might mean? The file zp-config.php does exist in that location.

Thanks,
Nathan

Sorry, you have to ask the SimpleScripts guys about that.

If on a manual install everything looks messed up design wise it could be a wrong htaccess or file/folder permissions.

After re-uploading manually and setting permissions, the pages still looked totally different. However, I noticed that they looked reasonably ok with the new updated effervescence theme. After duplicating the updated theme, the pages looked horrible again.

The issue turned out to be that when duplicating the updated theme and selecting the duplicate, some of the effervescence theme settings in the admin were not carried over. After comparing the settings of the updated theme with the duplicate and changing the required fields, everything matched up. I found that I could in fact copy some of my old php files without having to make huge modifications. So things are looking better!

Maybe you want to look into a possible bug with duplicating themes-- shouldn't the admin settings carry over (options-theme tab)?

duplicating themes simply makes copies of the scripts. When you then use that theme, any options will revert to the theme's defaults. There really is no correspondence to an active theme and any copies of its scripts.

Ah, Ok. Thanks.