Upgrade failed towards the end and won't continue, CP is blank

Question

I was upgrading my client’s website from a pretty early version (around 2.4 or something) to the latest. I followed all the steps in the upgrade process and when it started I could see it incrementally making upgrades.

However, it came up with this error after a while:

{“error”:” Error Number: 1060</p>\n\n Duplicate column name ‘includeseconds’</p>\n\n ALTER TABLE exp_members ADD \n\tinclude_seconds char(1) DEFAULT ‘n’ NOT NULL AFTER time_format</p>\n\n Filename: /www/eh20217/publichtml/system/codeigniter/system/database/DB_driver.php</p>\n\n Line Number: 382</p>”}

I then tried to do the upgrade again but it keeps carrying me to a blank page. I did some googling and decided to delete the safecracker folder from third party but that’s no help

I’ve tried deleting the installer folder but when I do that the control panel appears as blank.

I tried moving the installer folder to the root and then turned off extensions via config:

$config[‘allow_extensions’] = “n”;

And I actually get to the CP login screen but once I submit it goes to a blank page. I’ve deleted switchee from the third party folder because I also saw that someone was getting issues with that plugin when upgrading, but it hasn’t helped.

I also posted this as an urgent ticket since yesterday but I guess as it's weekend response time is slow.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

There were a few issues, all to do with outdated addons, which EE's support were stellar about investigating and fixing:

After turning on debugging this came up:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method Category_model::get_categories() 

This was caused by the Developer accessory and updating it fixed the issue.

Then we had 2 fieldtypes with the same issue - one was carthrob_matrix and the other was pt_switch. This was the basic error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method EE_Fieldtype::EE_Fieldtype() in /www/redacted/public_html/redacted/expressionengine/third_party/cartthrob/fieldtypes/ft.cartthrob_matrix.php on line 40

And we fixed it like this: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/support/simple-s3-uploader/viewthread/12869

We also had another issue with imgsizer:

Call to undefined method EE_Functions::remove_double_slashes() in /www/redacted/public_html/redacted/expressionengine/third_party/imgsizer/pi.imgsizer.php on line 42

It's really old and was calling a deprecated function. Robin switched out reduce_double_slashes() from the string helper for remove_double_slashes() and that seems to have it working.

The lesson is obviously to upgrade all addons before upgrading and to upgrade your EE installation often, don't wait 2 years ;(

Again, Robin at EllisLab was really great in tracking all this down and helping to fix it.