Having a stage site.

I have a site running an old version 5 of Dolphin and we are wanting to upgrade to 7.  I need to setup a stage site to complete the work and then promote that to production once I'm done.  My question is, is it possible to use our license on stage or do I just have to run it without the license and then enter the code after we push to production?  I'd rather not have to spend $99 just to have a stage site not for public usage.


Thanks,

Doug 

You can generate a free license from here: http://www.boonex.com/websites/licenses - and use that until it's safe to switch the paid license over.  Don't remember how 5 works, but you might even be able to use it without a license.

Upgrading from 5 will be a massive PITA.  You need to upgrade to 6.1.6 and then migrate your site over to 7 with the new migration module.

Thanks for the quick answer!  One more question,  If I copy the current site to a new one for staging (code and database) on a different domain will this be an issue and possible get our current license suspended messing up or production site?

Nope.  Just have a new (free) license issued for the new site.  Not sure how 5 works, but that should work.  I know 6 had those free and non-free releases.

i see you are trying to get upgraded from v-5. wow that is a flashback. there are many many issues in trying to upgrade this, and you would need to analyze exactly what it is that you are wanting to retain from your current version to the most recent release. 

what i understand about the dolphin license, but i really dont think it was applicable to v-5, is that you can run unlimited accounts on subdirectories, which is not the best method when trying to run a staging | qa | production suite. 

outside of aesthetics, not why licenses are even a consideration. there are many components from v-5 that are not going to be compatible with v-7. even to get your user database upgraded could be a challenge. i am looking at sourceforge and do not even see the opportunity to upgrade from v-5 at all. I have upgraded from v-6.x.x, but not done v-5, since the age on that is non-supported, and as far as i know, without going directly to boonex, this could prove to be an overwhelming attempt. 

if you have a programmer, then kudos to you, but they would need to have extensive knowledge of dolphin. There is one programmer that is non-boonex employeed, and that is James Tadeo. He has also been around since v-6, i honestly dont even know anybody including boonex employees other than andrew boone who have been around the dolphin scene pre-v6. 

If you have any ranking in Google at all I would NOT upgrade. If you do be prepared to drop to page 231,242,191 in the results. Just my 2 cents..

Well I'm sorry to hear that it will be so painful to go from v5 to the latest.  I figured if I could just get a hold of older versions I could slowly upgrade one version at a time.  I'm a programmer but don't have any knowledge of Dolphin.  A friend said I could have 45% of the profit of the site if I revamp it.  Right now hardly any features work on the site so I'm not too worried about breaking stuff, just losing the member database.  Maybe it would be easier to manually move everything into 7 like extract the MySQL data and move it?

Why should I worry about Google ranking?  We are #1 in some very great searches that is driving decent traffic to the site.  By upgrading to 7 what would cause me to lose rank?

I can't even find patches that old, so I don't know if an upgrade is possible now.  Best to migrate the profiles over to a new site.