Support

March 13, 2019 at 5:24 am

I call the site delicate because it’s old and in need of much more than a facelift…which is why it is being rebuilt.

Ok, so did you have any custom work done on EE3 at all or is all default?

It sounds like the best way to migrate the events would be to have the developers of the new site do it on their development site.

Do you have ‘active’ events?

Meaning events that you MUST migrate over from EE3 with current registrations etc?

If so the new site will need all the event data moved over to it, then migrated to EE4, however that’s going to need to be done as the very last step to prevent you from losing registrations. For example, if you copy the EE3 tables over today, migrate the new site over to EE4 and then don’t launch the new site for 2 weeks, the registrations made on the old site between now and when you launch will be ‘lost’ (they will be on the old site but you can not migrate them over).

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I notice that our renewal is coming up March 16. What do you recommend? should we update to EE4 and renew that way (on our current site)? Or should we renew EE3 on our current site, put EE4 on the new site, and have the developers migrate the EE3 calendar to the new development site?

Ok, my advice for the current site is to NOT migrate over to EE4 on that site. You can’t easily pull the events/registration etc from EE4 on one site onto another, so you currently have a working EE3 site, don’t migrate that over and then try to migrate that to the new site, it’s just not going to work smoothly, especially with limited resources.

With regards to renewal, I’d recommend discussing your options with our sales team. As your current license gives you access to both EE3 and EE4 you may find renewing your current license fits best.

Our families in the Special Needs community depend on being able to register for our events and it’s critical that we don’t have a break in website registration service. While we are fortunate to have help with developing a new website, we do not have any in-house tech support and have limited help from the developers. That’s why I want to be clear before moving forward.

So do you not have any breaks in your events at all?

Whilst it is possible to migrate EE3 to EE4 it’s going to take some planning and testing to confirm everything works on your new site. As your taking live registrations in EE3 at this time you’ll need to get everything ready, close registrations on the EE3 site, pull the EE3 tables to the new site, activate EE4 to migrate over, run through all of the migration steps and then open registrations again.

You mentioned its critical there is no break in the registration service, however, your not just switching from one version of EE3 to another, your switching to both a new site and a completely different event registration system (EE3 works differently to EE4) so you are going to have some downtime, though with planning you can keep that minimal.

The alternative is you’ll lose registrations as once you’ve migrated the data from EE3 to EE4 on the new site, it can’t be done incrementally after that. So registrations made on the old site with EE3 cannot be migrated to the EE4 site automatically, but you can do it manually at a push (that’s not going to be fun if you have a large gap between the migration and the switch).

So the steps I would take are:

Old site = the current EE3 site.
New site = the new site which you want to be running EE4 on.

#1. Create a full database backup of the new site now, OR create a copy of this new dev site. (IMPORTANT you are creating a copy of the site here, as after you’ve tested below, you want to revert back to this)

#2. Pull all of the _events_ tables (thats th EE3 database tables) from the old site and import them into the new new sites database. (Note – this is not the real migration, you are doing a test run on the current data, running the migration and confirming everything works on the DEV site, leaving the old site to continue to run)

#3. After running the migration on the new site, confirm your events, registration etc all work as expected.

#4. If all works as expected, great, it means the new site should not run into any issues when you run the live migration.

#5. Revert back to before you imported the tables (Note to developer, dropping the EE3 tables here is NOT sufficient, EE4 doesn’t use those tables, it pulls the tables and creates it’s own + muliplte custom post types within _posts, you need to revert for this to be ‘clean).

#6. When your are ready to move over, you close the registrations on the EE3 site, put it in maintenacne mode or whatever, but you need to temporarily close registrations to prevent data loss.

#7. Repull the _events_ tables the old site into the new.

#8. Run the migrations on the new site and confirm it works again.

#9. Open up the NEW site for registrations.

As you can see, this isn’t a simple process an will require planning to get right if you need to keep registrations open (or at least down for a minimal amount of time). Skipping the ‘test’ migration (1-5) could mean on the day you are ready to switch over, nothing works because the migrations fail, so I recommend doing it correctly.

Again, due to the changes you are making, you are going to have some downtime but you can keep it to a minimal.

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If I may ask, do you absolutely need the current (and previous) EE3 events or, could you set up a deadline for the events on the current site in which registrations close, then direct users to the new site for registrations after that date? Meaning you can start with a fresh install of EE4 with none current event data from EE3 which may not be an option for you, it depends on the data you need.

Doing it that way will reduce the stresses from above.

Ideally, you need a developer familiar with migrating sites to help with this as there’s a lot of moving parts to get this right.

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Does EE3 work with WP5?

We’ve had no reports of EE3 not working on WP5 and I run all of my test sites on the latest versions with no issues.

It is important to note that EE3 is no longer under ‘active’ development and only receives security updates at this time so whilst we do still continue to test it on the latest version of WordPress it does not receive the same amount of testing that EE4 does.

What about the Event Espresso-Calendar 2.2.7 that we are using along with EE 3.1.37.12P?

The latest version of EE3 is v3.1.37.14.P so if you are going to continue to use EE3, you’ll need to use that version.

The calendar version mentioned is the latest version for EE3.

We have no known issues with WP5 on either of those at this time.

Do we need to update that to 3?

Do you mean EE4 here?

We recommend everyone switch to EE4 as EE3 is no longer under active development, however, there are use cases in which EE3 fits better, for example, if you rely on the ‘recurring events’ add-on/features within EE3 then you’ll need to stick with it as EE4 does not support recurring events yet.

(I notice you don’t have REM on your license currently but you may already have the add-on so just covering all bases)

You have made have changes EE3 and EE4. I believe the Calendar plugin was included when we started using EE. I’m just trying to understand what we can do that is the most economical and also the most reliable. As a nonprofit we need both economy and reliability to continue serving our community.

To discuss which is the best fit for you I’d recommend contacting our sales team which can do using this form: https://eventespresso.com/contact/

Your current license gives you access to both EE3 and EE4 + the equivalent add-ons.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Tony. Reason: Typo, spacing

April 5, 2019 at 9:02 am

Just to check, you’re going with a fresh, clean install of EE4 and having the EE3 site as an archive on its own site, right? Meaning your not migrating any of the EE3 data over and just starting new, you may well transfer registrations over to the new site, but you’re not migrating from EE3 to EE4 anymore?

Do you recommend exporting our calendar data first using the export button?

Just to clarify, which export button do you mean?

Personally, I’d recommend backing up the database rather than exporting. Using phpMyAdmin, or a plugin to export the whole database, then update to the latest version.

I can tell you that there are no database changes between 3.1.37.12P and 3.1.37.14P so there should be very little impact on your site, its basically bug fixes to the code rather than changes to the database. Although backing up is always good practice.

Can you suggest a way to close registrations on the EE3 website and point people to the new site?

EE3 has the same ‘Alternative registration URL’ option that you found in EE4, so you could, set the EE3 event to have the Alt Registration URL that points to the EE4 event on the new site.

Will that work for you? It means if anyone manages to get to the ‘old’ event they’ll be sent to the new site when they try to register.

Something to note, is it sounds like your running both sites together, are you transferring domains on the 1st or is it also a new domain?

Or should we just let people register until April 29th and take them down then and manually extract the registration data? What would be the best path?

Its hard to say which is the best path, it depends on the number of registrations and just how much work it would be to transfer those registrations over from the old site to the new (you’d have to do it manually, so in short, it depends on how many questions you ask on the registration, as you’ll need to manually copy the answers over, and how many registrations there are).

If possible, I would direct the users to the new site from now (if its available to take registrations) as its one less thing to worry about on change over day.

Perhaps we could:
Close registrations on the EE3 website and refer people to the new website
Manually collect the registration data for the courses in May
Create new training events on the EE4 website
Transfer the registration data manually

Does this make sense?

It does and there’s nothing wrong with doing it that way, it just may take some time to manually input those registrations into the new events.

You know on the new site you can already have the events created ready to go? You don’t need to wait for the site to be live to create those events and have them waiting, meaning they could be created now and again, is one less thing to worry about on change over day.

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One last thing, you’ve mentioned purchasing another license multiple times but you don’t actually need another license. By all means, your welcome to have more than one license but it basically grants you support and updates on one site, so if you only need support/updates on the EE4 site you can swap your license to be an EE4 license (or leave it as if you want) and just use the license on the new site.

Does that make sense?

April 11, 2019 at 6:26 am

Hi Virginia,

The old site will be archived, and so it should still be using the EE3 plug in. Correct?

Correct.

On the development site, I want to go ahead and download those files, but I want to make sure our current site isn’t affected by that action.

Nope, not at all.

I think there’s some confusion on what happens with the license, what it is used for and the data on your site.

First, all of the EE data is yours, its all on your site within the database and we have no control over it, there’s no action you can take with regards to licensing from EE that will ever cause you to lose data.

The license key is used for support and updates, so pretty much the only issue you can run into with the license is your site shows you there is an update for EE but then won’t let you download the update through the WordPress dashboard, again, you’ll never, ever, lose data due to a license issue. This can happen for multiple reasons and your account can be flagged to show the notice if another plugin interferes with the request sent to our servers for your license, so we’ve be pretty crazy to (if we even could) do anything with your data if there was an issue with your account.

Do you advise a new, clean install (with new license) of EE4 for the dev site, or will an upgrade be sufficient?

Is this a question in terms of licencing or the software itself?

In terms of upgrading and the software (EE4 version) used, there’s no difference, its all the same version of EE4 and you don’t need a new license to run EE4 on your new site. Infact, whilst you have EE4 installed on the dev site I recommend you DON’T set the license key on it, EE4 will function in exactly the same way without a license key but you obviously can’t do the updates through the Plugin menu without one.

The reason I say don’t set the key is the license will be linked to your development domain (whichever domain is active on the site when you add the key) so then when you change the domain, you’ll see a notice and need to reset your key etc… avoid that by simply waiting for the site to go live and then add they key. (It’s not a major issue if you do add the key, we’ll just reset it for you when needed, but it just saves a little messing around on your behalf).

If you are asking if I think you should update EE3 on the site and migrate the EE3 data over to EE4, then no, I’d recommend with a clean install of EE4 (you’ll have the option to migrate your data or not when you install EE4 on the dev site).

The link to the EE4 files is only for the EE4 and not the calendar and table add-ons, is this correct?

No, that’s not correct and it’s not what I see on your account.

These are the downloads I see on your account: https://slack-files.com/T02SY781D-FHT75GM7S-8f6d88ecc7

You don’t have access to the table view add-on but EE4 core, the Calendar and payment methods which are available within EE3 and we have add-ons for in EE4.

We are a non-profit. Does the discount also apply to these add-ons, or just EE4? If we go with a new license, can we transfer the balance of our current, recently renewed license?

You can switch you current license to an EE4 license from your account page (just above the download section shwon above) and it will automatically calculate the cost of changing for you. However, I’m not sure if that will also take into consideration any discounts you have applied to your account, for that you will need to contact our sales team. You can do that here:

https://eventespresso.com/contact/

Select a billing question and, add the requested details and a member of the sales team will contact you directly to discuss it, we don’t discuss sales/account details on the forums and I generally have very little dealings with sales so I’m not the best person to answer this question for you.