NOTE: BEFORE CONTINUING: Please read posts below additional information. Especially Miro Dietiker's post.


I have seen a lot of people state they have completed a clean installation, but that is not always the case. A clean install will help with many database issues including foreach() errors.

To complete a truly clean install of fireboard, you need to do more than just uninstall the component. Here is my guide to a completely clean installation. If you are not familiar with database operations, I highly recommend trying this out on a test site before trying it on your actual site.

1. Uninstall your old component.



2. Backup your ENTIRE Joomla database. Even if you are only plan on dropping previous Fireboard tables, you should back up everything in case you drop something you didn't want to by mistake. You can backup using PHPMyAdmin or CPanel if you have it. Your webhost may provide other methods for backup as well.

3a (OPTIONAL). If you wish to re-import your fireboard messages/categories, etc then launch PHPMyAdmin, select your database from the list and click the "Export" tab.




3b (OPTIONAL). Highlight all of the Fireboard tables (those beginning with jos_fb_) by default, choose either Zip or GZip compression and click "Go". This should initiate a file download of your SQL tables.

4a. Drop your Fireboard tables.



4b. Select the "Structure" tab in PHPMyAdmin and tick the checkbox next to each of the fireboard tables (those beginning with jos_fb_). At the bottom of all the tables, from the drop-down box, select "Drop". You will then be presented with a confirmation box for your selection. Hit yes if this is correct.

5. Install Fireboard as you would any normal component.

6. Make sure you see the following dialog box when launching Fireboard for this first time. If you do not, you have not dropped the old tables properly.



7 (OPTIONAL-See Step 3). If you backed up your Fireboard tables, click on "Import" from PHPMyAdmin. Browse to the location of the zip file you downloaded and click "Go."

Congrats, you have a completely CLEAN installation of Fireboard.

I gave you Karma for this post and also for your extremely helpful videos that you put together so kudos to you for that. Brilliant job.

However, I think I might have found a little bug with the DB configuration and alignment with the previous version (1.0.1). I'm currently test running the current beta 1.0.2 RC, and found that when I performed step 7 from your above post, I ran into trouble.

I trying to isolate the problem I decided to unzip the backed up 1.0.1 tables and manually add the sql code, bit by bit within PHP My Admin.

Here's what I've come up against. Maybe it's a work in progress, I don't know, but I thought I'd post to make sure it's something that's on the radar as I would imagine that most users of the board will be looking to migrate from 1.0.1 to 1.0.2

A couple of minutes comparing the differences in tables between 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 (and looking through the sql changes in the downloadable zip in this section) I noticed some additional columns added to a couple of the important tables.

As a result, before actually dropping (exporting) your previous WHATEVER_fb_* tables, you must run some "ALTER TABLE" commands first.

It would be worth altering your post slightly to reflect this as I'm sure there are hundreds (probably thousands) of people looking to upgrade to 1.0.2 from 1.0.1 to test it and this is really all they need to do.

Again, great post and a perfect insight into how the component all comes together.

Regards,

MickoD

Thanks for the insights and help with this post. I don't claim to be any sort of expert on PHPMyAdmin or MySQL, so your input is appreciated. Thanks for the compliments on the video tutorials.

What a nice description, really great job.

Please correct the howto with the following issues:
As long as no column gets added in betweeen the deleted and the restored version, anything gets fine. But this is NOT THE CASE in most situations.

To get a perfect working howto, do on each jos_fb_ export the following properties:
- NO Structure (option)
- Data: COMPLETE INSERTS (check this option, MOST IMPORTANT)
- Data: Extended Inserts (to get much smaller export file)
(This yould solve MickoDs problem)

Now, when some column gets added, the inserts won't break!
NO ALTER required anymore!
(except when containing before columns that are removed later on... When you get an error on import such as "column 'image' missing on table jos_fb_categories", simply add it for the duration of import and delete it afterwards again...)

In any other case (when not deleting the entire Database), you need to verify structure column by column... and you don't have to do any mistake...

Wow quite amazing!! now my time to do my part after holidays

Thanks a bunch. I knew this is what I had to do but didn't know exactly how to go about it.

This is a wonderful explanation!! Thank you for the step-by-step explanation. My fireboard 1.0.4 installation was a breeze after following this. Awesome!