Hey Ross

Thank you we have MYP2P and WOW Friends up and will have couples up in a bit.  Here are the steps we took to get there and I hope this helps all. OH make sure, if you haven't done so yet, copy any custom CSS you might have built.  You might lose this and having to rewrite it would suck! 

If you use HostForWeb and you are experiencing the following issues: a PDO Exception Error and Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting ')' in /home/myurl/public_html/ow_pluginfiles/base/lang_1.php then this might help> a few days prior to the 

• Oxwall 1.7 release

here are the steps we took to get things running again:

1. Don't focus on getting everything up at once!

2 Ask HFW to get you to the point where you can access your admin panel,(reference my sites, if they are unsure what you are asking them to do, myp2pwall.com, wowfriends.wowbrows.me and coupleslove2play.com  

3. If after they get your site running and you get a 403 error "forbidden" statement, add "admin" at the end of the url and this should bring up the login screen.

4. Go to your plugin admin panel and deactivate all plugins which were not core apps, basically deactivate all 3rd party plugins.  If you can't get into your admin panel go to the myphpadmin panel in cpanel.  

Find your ow.base.plugin table.  Click on the table and edit any third party plugin's isActive section.  If the plugin isActive is set at 1 set it to 0.
5. At this point you should be able to login to the admin panel online( you still might need to add the 'admin" after your url), you might still get a 500 error at this point and through out some other steps, just click your back button after any execution that causes the 500 error and you should be back to where you were but it will be updated. 

6 Ensure all third party plugins are deactivated and**** NOTE and this is a big note!  If you have the Advanced Photo Plugin and the Profile Carousel plugins, the carousel needs the advanced photo plugin in order for it to work, DO NOT UPDATE THESE PLUGINS!!   The Adv. Photo plugin seems to be the cause of the PDO exception error everyone is seeing/getting. Also I would refrain from turning on the Admin Tool Box Plugin, not sure if this was the cause but definitely was buggy and caused some of the issues. It seems the Adv. Photo plugin is the main cause, Kudos to them they are very transparent about the issue, Advanced Photo Plugin , and it's overwriting the SQL DB this is what's causing scripts to run before they are actually uploaded to the server and in turn causes the timeouts for all the other apps and then you get the exception error of Can't find the SQL DB. I suspect and maybe I'm wrong that's OK but this is probably a result of the Oxwall 1.7 photo overhaul.  No one's fault just happened.   Your best to delete all of them entirely off the server through the Plugin Admin Tool Only. DO NOT ATTEMPT a Manual Removal they are incredibly interconnected to anything that has a photo.

7. Then go to themes and update the themes, all of them, then activate the original theme which was most likely origin. Go back into plugin admin.

8. Update to 1.7 if not already on it.  Sometimes you might have to revert back to one of your 1.6 version back ups and start the process all over again but it will work.
 

9. Then update all core apps.  You might get 500 errors, hit your browsers back button.  This will happen because the plugins are very interconnected with one another and the system is looking for the path to probably a third party app which is not active at the moment. 

10. Once everything is updated and you can get to the main page by typing in the address without any error messages, go back to themes, reactivate the theme you were using.  Just a Note here:
Oxwall is no longer supporting the following themes,

• Oxwall 1.7 release

"Theme support

With this release we drop support for the following themes maintained by Oxwall Foundation:

• Grunge
• Basic
• City
• Green
• Pastel
• Graphite
• Graphite+
• Club
• Rainy
• Spring
• Stars
• Silent

If you use one of these themes, please be aware that they are not getting updated to Oxwall 1.7. Feel free to choose another theme in the Oxwall Store (check 1.7 compatibility), or apply the changes by yourself if you have the skills. The reason for this decision is simple: focus. In order to concentrate on iterating critical product components, we have to cut off non-core ones."

If they are not supporting they are not updating so it's a good idea to move to a new theme  I would make sure the new theme is relatively new like launched within the last thirty days or the theme says it has been tested on 1.7 also a quick note just to ask them if it has been tested might be a good idea and read the reviews and bug reports!

11. Check out your custom CSS section and if you are missing the css you wrote then paste in the copy of the CSS we discussed earlier.

12. Once this is all done ask HFW to move you to a server with PHP 5.4.3 running.  Now you might still get  an error after the  move.  Ensure all FTP info has been moved, make sure your plugins which record the IP address of your sites address are correct in Your Purchase section at the Oxwall Store . 

I have not been through the whole move to PHP 5.4.3 server move yet but I did set up a new site on our server, login.brandxmobile.net (not ready yet please don't judge yet :) which is running on 5.4.3 and I experienced very similar if not the same in many cases and had to reinstall back up etc.. errors.  And the steps were identical to get everything working with the exception of loading the site, the plugins and theme from start.  

I will be moving early next week.  And I will let everyone know how it went and if we experienced any issues.  I hope this helps Let me know if I can be of any further service and also:  

To the Techs @ Oxwall (Ross especially)

Please accept my apologies for being, a jackass, mean, threatening and any other ugliness through out this process.  I was very frustrated and felt extremely helpless as I am sure you feel the same way as well.  But this all worked out, clients will get over it and as usual YOU GUYS HUNG IN THERE DEALT WITH ME AND HERE'S A BIG BIG BIG THANK YOU!!!

And finally:

HostForWeb Rocked it out as well!  I was just as much of pain to them. They get a big thank you and I would Highly Recommend them for any company looking for a quality Hosting Solution and Partner.  Their ability to manage problems and challenges like this is commendable!  Great Service!

Thank you Drake, for such an extensive post with step-by-step insructions. I recommend you also, to contact plugin developers of  Advanced Photo Plugin and Profile Carousel to resolve those issue. 

Ross;

We have had a total failur of Coupleslove2play and hfw can't get me back online.  I can see everything in my PHPadmin but the my file system on the cpanel is showing apps and sw from months agao.  I know this has nothing to do with Oxwall.  But I have a question.  Can I do a clean sweep of the system and start from fresh then upload a user file from current php admin?

Drake in this case you will need to install the software of the same version you had, the same version of plugins and the same set of plugins you had in order the software to work properly with this database you have. 

Why don't you use this backup in order to update the software?

That is possible based on my last bu I did this am.  But what about using something like this:Bulk User Registration and pulling down a flat file from the db we don't have a ton of active users yet.  I can probably manage with an email campaign and some free stuff to get them all to update their profile info.

If you want to transfer just user info, you can use CSV import/export plugins? in order to transfer content you will need to write a script of conversion, as the tables and file format have been changed in 1.7

Ross where exactly in the setup does the system point to the db.  There seems to be an issue with it pulling the correct db maybe I can manually override this but not sure where to go and tell the engine to point to the correct db

is there a map of the 1.7 tables somewhere?

This is done in the config.php file you indicate host/db name/username and password

Hi, I'm having the same problem, i'm on hostgator.

You can view the site logged out but when you click join or try to view the site while logged in I get the e500 error.

This is my debug.

do the search on the forum bbw, this issue has been resolved in many other topics

I have searched for the last hour, thats why I posted. Can you point me in the right direction?

OK, thanks, So I have changed the ow-logs file to 777

I went to that database and found one that wasn't utf8_general_ci and changed both the rows and saved. but in the information box at the bottom it's still utf8_unicode_ci.

Sorry I don't know much about database errors.

If the problem persists, you need to look through the whole DB and check all your tables and rows. Also you need to rename ow_logs to ow_log and set it to 777

ok I changed the folder name from ow_logs to ow_log and now that is fixed.

I went through all the database tables and found I had to change the rows in  ow_base_question_to_account_type from unicode to general aswell.

So all fixed now thanks.

Great!