Thanks Holch.

This conversation has been good in identifying the need to move but most importantly that although its going to be difficult it is doable.

The approach we have discussed this morning is to..
* Replicate the current installation into a dev environment.
* Use comfortupdate to 2.7 then to 3.7
* Recreate our default templates using the new template system (never extend an extended template, a lesson we have already learnt)
* Recreate the heavily customised templates using the new template system
* Invite all our admins to test their respective surveys
* Fix any identified issues (the part we are afraid of)
* Once given a clean bill of health back up the existing
* Recreate our changes and import the new templates
* Again ask the admins to return to quickly go over their surveys to verify all has gone well

If it fails at that point - Panic

Can I also say in an unrelated matter the editor for this forum is woeful in Firefox. It cannot even do basic bullet pointing to existing text it just puts all the text into one bullet point and the text overlaps (incorrect line height)

DeveloperChris wrote: (never extend an extended template, a lesson we have already learnt)

We have no critical bug about it for now, just a problem with some "ghost" css files generating a 404 notice in the console. So what was your lesson about? Have you reported any bug about it?

If it fails at that point - Panic

Sounds like you have planned this through into the last detail...

But honestly, I think the approach you have discussed this morning sounds very reasonable and at the moment I can't imagine anything else, to make the transition smoother.
My main worries would be the templates. I don't see why the rest should break (but we all know how things go...).

DeveloperChris wrote: (never extend an extended template, a lesson we have already learnt)

We have no critical bug about it for now, just a problem with some "ghost" css files generating a 404 notice in the console. So what was your lesson about? Have you reported any bug about it?

I will post a bug. Its not something I personally worked on but have just asked my coworker for the details
He explained it like this...

Using LS 3.4.x
Created an extension theme we will call it theme1
Created an extension based on the extension (theme1) we will call that theme2
All was working.
Decided to upgrade using comfortupdate to LS3.7
This broke the site. Any attempt to go to the themes page was greeted with a server 500 error.
The solution was to dive into the database and re-enable theme1 which was disabled for some reason by comfortupdate.
Thus theme2 could not find it and errored resulting in the server 500.
After re-enabling theme1 everything started working again.

DeveloperChris wrote:

DeveloperChris wrote: (never extend an extended template, a lesson we have already learnt)

We have no critical bug about it for now, just a problem with some "ghost" css files generating a 404 notice in the console. So what was your lesson about? Have you reported any bug about it?

I will post a bug. Its not something I personally worked on but have just asked my coworker for the details
He explained it like this...

Using LS 3.4.x
Created an extension theme we will call it theme1
Created an extension based on the extension (theme1) we will call that theme2
All was working.
Decided to upgrade using comfortupdate to LS3.7
This broke the site. Any attempt to go to the themes page was greeted with a server 500 error.
The solution was to dive into the database and re-enable theme1 which was disabled for some reason by comfortupdate.
Thus theme2 could not find it and errored resulting in the server 500.
After re-enabling theme1 everything started working again.

So : this bug doesn't exist anymore (I just tried to reproduce by direct edition of the DB)

This bug was affecting the first versions of LS3. Now, if a theme doesn't work (because it's extending a theme that doesn't exist anymore), then the installation fall back to the default theme. If the default theme is the extended theme, then it fall back on vanilla.

So you can safely extend an extended theme, many people are doing it.

LouisGac wrote:

DeveloperChris wrote:

DeveloperChris wrote: (never extend an extended template, a lesson we have already learnt)

We have no critical bug about it for now, just a problem with some "ghost" css files generating a 404 notice in the console. So what was your lesson about? Have you reported any bug about it?

I will post a bug. Its not something I personally worked on but have just asked my coworker for the details
He explained it like this...

Using LS 3.4.x
Created an extension theme we will call it theme1
Created an extension based on the extension (theme1) we will call that theme2
All was working.
Decided to upgrade using comfortupdate to LS3.7
This broke the site. Any attempt to go to the themes page was greeted with a server 500 error.
The solution was to dive into the database and re-enable theme1 which was disabled for some reason by comfortupdate.
Thus theme2 could not find it and errored resulting in the server 500.
After re-enabling theme1 everything started working again.

So : this bug doesn't exist anymore (I just tried to reproduce by direct edition of the DB)

This bug was affecting the first versions of LS3. Now, if a theme doesn't work (because it's extending a theme that doesn't exist anymore), then the installation fall back to the default theme. If the default theme is the extended theme, then it fall back on vanilla.

So you can safely extend an extended theme, many people are doing it.

This bug most certainly still exists, or a variant of some sort. I just paid to enable the comfort update as my manual process was causing LimeSurvey to complain about logo_icon.png being missing and thought it was something I was missing. Alas Comfort Update caused the same problem and fixing that causes Error 500 to appear, rendering LimeSurvey as broken.

Thankfully I have backups, but right now I have buyers remorse.

no it doesn't: I've tested it, and if you delete from DB a theme that other theme extends, it doens't block anything. If you're able to make a nice bug report with step to reproduce: you're welcome.

About 500 errors: we had a bunch of reports those last weeks, all of them were coming from FTP errors while uploading files to production server.

Hi Louis

I saw that you concluded the bug was related to an earlier version of LS3. in our case we started at 3.6.x I assume that was not the earlier version you meant.

I was going to respond to the bug closure but as I wasn't the one who identified the bug it was my co-worker who could not remember the exact details I decided to leave it closed. It may have been a mistake he made.

I will see if I can replicate the problem an will report back if I can or can't.

In our case it was definitely not an ftp corruption error.