[OJS 2.4.6] What is the best way to upgrade a OJS 2.4.6 with multiple journals to OJS 3.1.1-4?

Hi everyone

I have created this topic because I have a doubt of what is the best way to upgrade an instance of OJS 2.4.6 which has about 80 journals, some have editorial process and others don’t. I need to care all the information about the editorial workflow of the journals have it.

In the past I have made the upgrading of a journal with editoral process and I have to say that was a hard task, because for some reason the upgrading process always finished with the PHP Fatal error. With the help of @bozana in this topic I could get the success in that process.

I have made the upgrading of a extracted journal from this instance OJS 2 with multiple journals, i.e, using the native export plugin for issues, articles, and users, I have took out that journal and set up in an clean OJS 2 instance, and over this instance execute the upgrading process and finally I have got success.

However this time I need to upgrade the OJS 2.4.6 with all its journals, and I have fear that this could be a harder task and the process could take an exponential time in accomplish it.

For the upgrading of my first journal, which has editorial process, it took me about 2 o 3 weeks cleaning the rows in the database that resulted in the failure. And for my second upgrading process for the journal without editorial workflow, it took me about a couple hours.

That’s why I have created this topic because I couldn’t find in the forum about this. I hope the team of PKP could give some suggestions about it.

Thanks in advance.

I’d recommend giving this process a dry run (testing on a development server) and reporting any errors here. There has been a bit of work on the Upgrade process in the last year; you’ll probably find the effort more robust than it was at the end of 2017.

As some encouragement, I’m working on piloting an upgrade of a single install with over 40 journals with a long span of historic data and diverse workflow processes, and after fixing one bug, the upgrade processes reported success on the second try.

Hi @ctgraham thanks for your response.

I have the doubt if is necessary upgrade the OJS 2.4.6 instance to 2.4.8.3 first or I can upgrade directly to 3.1.1.4?

In fact I have a copy of my OJS 2.4.6 instance with multiple journals in other server, I have deleted some journals leaving only 2 journals of them and this would be my first try, I have decided start this process with only 2 journals because I suppose that this is the most simple case, then see what kind of errors arise in the process.

Well thanks a lot for your attention.

Upgrading from any release of 2.4.x is supported.

Let us know how your test goes!