Some older installations of phpwcms were installed on hosting accounts which are online since a long time. So your hosting company/sysadmin might have upgraded MySQL 3.x to 4.x to 5.x. MySQL saw a lot of improvements regarding charset handling. This can cause problems when you try to upgrade on another account than the one is still productive.
I always recommend to make a copy and do the upgrade there. But export and re-import into new database might fail. I saw such behavior while upgrading a phpwcms install with windows-1250/cp1250 and collation cp1250_czech_cs. That forced me to find a solution. Keep in mind that a backup might make problems too, so test against such possible problems before it is too late. phpMyAdmin, MySQLDumper and also Chive failed. But I stick with phpMyAdmin. It is still the best browser based MySQL tool.
The only chance was to make a copy into the same existing database. Be warned — handle with care! You can loose all data!
Copying into the same database means to add a new table prefix to get a new table name like newprefix_phpwcms_article ($phpwcms['db_prepend'] = 'newprefix').
First you need the list of all table names of your old phpwcms install – select SQL tab of your database and fill in
Code: Select all
SHOW TABLES
Code: Select all
=REPLACE(A1;1;8;"mynewprefix")
Code: Select all
="mynewprefix_"&A1
The last step is to generate the formula necessary to duplicate all existing old tables into new named.
Code: Select all
="CREATE TABLE "&B1&" LIKE "&A1&"; INSERT INTO "&B1&" SELECT * FROM "&A1&";"
If you are not really sure what you are doing there try on a backup first or ask someone else.
Then duplicate your existing installation and make it running based on duplicated database tables. Then start the final upgrade!