Thanks to all who helped make the v15 upgrade a success, and thanks also to everyone who has already downloaded and installed the new version. I’ve heard lots of good comments!
As I’ve helped install the upgrade for many of you, I’ve come across a few common situations that I thought I’d mention for the benefit of those who haven’t yet taken the step:
- The database step shows an error and nothing works. This usually means that you’re still running an older version of PHP. TNG v15 requires at least PHP 7.4, and I recommend going even higher if you can (8.0+). Most of you will be able to upgrade your PHP from the site control panel (or “cPanel”), or you can ask your hosting provider. If things still don’t work after upgrading PHP, look at the PHP config screen and make sure the following boxes are all checked: gd, mbstring, mysqli.
- The admin home page won’t come up. If the rest of the site works but the admin home page returns an error, it could be related to some changes with the Mod Manager (because of the counter there that shows how many mods you have, even if you have none). Here are the troubleshooting steps I take when I encounter this:
- Make sure PHP has been upgraded (see above).
- Install the 15.0.1 upgrade, as that includes a few fixes for the Mod Manager.
- See if you have a file called version.php in the classes folder. If so, delete it.
- Do you have an mmconfig.php file in the main TNG folder? If not, or if the file is there but isn’t writeable, that could be the issue. You can find this file in the v15 full version zip.
- Is the Root Path still correct? Sometimes this can change without notice from your provider. Go to Admin/Setup/General Settings/Paths & Folders and blank out the Root Path, then save (TNG will now determine the correct path dynamically). But how do you get there if you can’t get to the Admin menu? Just go directly to admin_setup.php to get to the Setup page. It’s only the admin *menu* that doesn’t work in this situation.
- Menu options missing. TNG v15 now allows you to turn off individual menu options. If you didn’t do that but some are missing, go to Admin/Setup/General Setting/Menu to turn them back on. You can turn off media categories you’re not using by running the “Trim Media Menus” utility under Admin/Utilities/Post-Import Utilities.
- Everyone is marked as “Living”. Go to Admin/Setup/General Settings/Privacy and change the “Show living data” option from “Never” to “Depending on user rights”. The “Never” option there did not do what most people expected, so I removed it. Sites that had “Never” selected anyway might find themselves in this situation. The “Depending” option is what you wanted anyway. 🙂
- Google Maps show an error on top of the maps. This isn’t actually a result of the upgrade, but I’ve noticed it enough to say something. If you see the maps but there’s a message on top that says the maps are “for development purposes only”, that means that Google wants you to link a credit card to your Google account. They won’t charge you for using the maps unless you request an astronomical number of maps in a month, so there’s not much to worry about there.