Greetings to all, and congrats to the PKP Team for the OJS 3.0 release:
I work for a college that is using v. 2.3.1.2. since like 2010; it was never updated nor had any patches applied, and is now facing some issues with the database and the whole update process. In a meeting with my colleagues, we talked about how we could sort the problems of the updates and we have some doubts about the process and was wondering if we could find some help in the forum.
We thought in leaving the current editions of our journals in the v. 2.3.1.2. and make a new 3.0 (or at least, v. 2.4 to upgrade) install to publish the upcoming editions from now on. Having the same journal cut in half in two different versions of the system is possible to work with? Would it work with metadata harvesting indexes that share our content? This is due to the fact that some of our journals are indexed by DOAJ and Latin American Open Databases like Dialnet and Redalyc.
Do you think this would be a viable option? Do you have any suggestions on the matter?
Hi @trevorbelmont,
You could divide your journal in half, but you’d just be avoiding solving the maintenance problem on your old installation – as this gets older, it’ll get riskier – and other aspects like Google Scholar indexing, OAI, etc., will get more complicated. And it’s a lot harder to merge two installations together than to split them apart, so you’d be imposing another challenge later down the line.
I think the best thing to do would be to work on the upgrade of your old journal and then use the upgraded installation for new content. It might be less of a chore than you suspect – if you’re able to describe the upgrade challenges here, I can possibly help.
Note that 2.3.1-2 is old enough that we’re not supporting direct upgrades to OJS 3.0. You’ll need to go via an intermediate 2.4.x version – the current 2.4.8-1 is your best bet. This is actually good news, as it’ll cleanly separate any issues with your problematic 2.3.x install from the 2.x-to-3.x upgrade process, which will involve a learning curve. The best approach, for stability’s sake, might be to upgrade your old installation to 2.4.8-1, let it settle in for a while to ensure that everything is behaving as expected, and then plan for an upgrade to 3.0 whenever you feel ready.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
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