Make a full backup of your website's database. Don't rely on myPHPNuke's tabledump only. Although the developers are familiar with the tabledump utility and we have been able to create complete backups of our myPHPNuke drivev sites, we also know from experience that unstable server setups or limited bandwidth can cause incomplete backups. Bottom line, if you know how to verify a complete database backup, then you can rely on the backup utility.

When you are not familiar with the structure of a sql file, we advise you to use phpMyAdmin or the database backup facilities that your hosting provider offers you via shell access. When your hosting provider doesn't provide you with seperate database backup tools, use phpMyAdmin. Make sure that you have a very stable connection to the Internet and that the backup phpMyAdmin creates is complete. You can check the backup file by opening it in your programmer's editor and check if all the myPHPNuke tables of your database are available. You can identify the myPHPNuke table by the prefix that your website uses (by default the prefix is "mpn_").

Most of the time, people (and you may very likely be one of them) make small changes to the original files of myPHPNuke. This is OK, however all of the files in version 1.8.8_8 have changed, so a file by file upgrade will not work. It is highly advised you backup your current MPN installation so you can transfer your modifications to the new scripts after the upgrade is complete. For a detailed list of code changes that are necessary to let your own scripts run inside myPHPNuke version 1.8.8_8, please refer to appendix 8, "Upgrade your code to myPHPNuke 1.8.8_8".

Always create a new directory when upgrading myPHPNuke with a release candidate. Extract all the files into this directory. Until the final version of myPHPNuke 1.8.8_8 is released, it is highly recommended you always use a new directory when upgrading. Many files have been added and deleted, file locations have changed, etc... If you try to overwrite an old installation, you will not only leave many dead files and directories, but you may also compromising your web sites security.

The distribution kit contains empty config files. You need to copy the following config files from your existing website to the corresponding directories on your local machine:

myPHPNuke provides for use of a database table prefix. This allows you to use a single database for multiple stand alone myPHPNuke installs. Because of this, not every user is running their database with the default prefix of "mpn_". Please remember when running the installer for an upgrade, you MUST specify the proper DB table prefix if not using the default prefix or the installer will create a new set of tables. If for some reason you forget, you can modify the table prefix in the file dbconf.php, located in the myPHPNuke install root.

Upload all files and directories from the new install directory on your local machine to the host machine. If your hosting service provides for extraction of compressed files, it is highly recommended you re-compress the distribution in the format supported by your provider. Uploading a single compressed file is not only considerably faster, but eliminates the likely hood of corrupt files, which can happen during FTP transfers. Once the file has been uploaded, use whatever extraction utility is available to extract the compressed files content to it's new location.

Always check and re-apply all CHMOD settings on directories and files as instructed in the next section of the manual when upgrading. If you followed the install instructions, you should have installed into a new location, therefore all CHMOD settings will need to be re-applied.

There have been a few minor database changes since version 1.8.8_7. In order to apply these changes to existing databases, it is required you run the installer. When running the installer you will need your database name and login information available.