How to Upgrade your Simple Machines Forum

Keeping your forum software up to date is a very important thing. Forum upgrades fix bugs and improve on security vulnerabilities keeping you and your users safe. Considering that most people who use free software don’t know how it works keeping your forum updated can safeguard you from spam, hackers and more security threats. In this how-to I am going to show you how to upgrade your simple machines forum to the latest version. It is a good forum engine, not completely open source but better than even paid software.

Upgrading forum software is moving from a previous major release to the current version. Say you were running on SMF 2.0.4, you may want to upgrade to the latest version which is 2.0.5 If you want to upgrade with mods installed, consider patching. That is available from the package manager in the administration center.

Always back up your forum before any upgrades. Some actions are irreversible and interference with database tables can render your forum unusable or lead to loss of data. Back up your forum from the administration center, cPanel or even PHPMyAdmin.

After a successful back up, go to www.simplemachines.org and download the latest package. If you have been using mods in your forum choose the Large upgrade. You can choose to download in different file formats but I recommend .zip files as they are easy to extract.

Upload your .zip file to the root folder of your website. This is the same folder that contains your index.php file. Extract all files.

From your browser bar, navigate towards www.yourdomainname.com/upgrade.php. Remember to substitute yourdomainname.com with the URL of your forum. If your forum is hosted on a sub-folder e.g. www.yourdomainname.com/forum/  ensure that you have provided the correct path.

If you are experiencing problems with the installation, ensure that you have provided the correct folder permissions. This is important as it will determine whether you can install mods in your forum. In most cases the SMF upgrade utility can handle this for you. If not, choose a setting of 755 for folders and 644 for files. It will work for most servers. If it doesn’t work for you choose 777 or 775 for folders, and 666 or 664 for files. Some hosting companies won’t allow you to choose high values for files such as 666 or 777 as it causes internal server errors.

You upgrade should run smoothly. If not open a new page and enter restart the upgrade. If prompted, choose to continue the installation from where you stopped. It might save you a few precious minutes. After upgrading, re-enable your mods for extra functionality.

Always keep your forum up to date to ensure your users get the best experience and security is guaranteed.

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