Bulletin Board Upgrade

It had been a while since I have tried to upgrade the MyBB software for my bulletin board. They just released a major upgrade, so it was important to get up-to-date (I think). Here’s what I needed to do:

First, shut the bulletin board down temporarily.

Second, backup all the files. There is a control panel that lets me download a backup file, but I can also do a backup to the server, which I think would work better. Best to do both. Also it is best to download copies of settings.php and config.php in the inc folder, just to be safe.

Download the software. I thought there was a way to do this through cPanel, but maybe not. Instead I just downloaded it to my hard drive and then uploaded to the forum folder. Fortunately, myBB is very, very small, only about a megabyte.

Using cPanel’s File Manager, extract the installation file into a temp folder. Then, using File Manager again (my FTP software wouldn’t do this because it won’t overwrite directories with files in them), copy all of the files in the temp/upload folder into the mybb folder, overwriting just about everything.

Now set some of the file permissions per the instructions

Now, in a web browser, go to the forum URL /install/upgrade.php and follow the instructions.

Clean up. Delete the install folder, the zip file, and the temp folder. Reset permissions on config and settings to 666.

One thought on “Bulletin Board Upgrade”

  1. Did another upgrade today. I should have read these instructions, but instead unzipped the files on my computer and uploaded them which is more time-consuming. Something happened to the styles which I didn’t notice immediately because the style was still cached. I found some instructions that walked me through changing some settings through the MyBB control panel plus some file permissions and got it working again.

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