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Upgrading

Form Tools is made up of a separate of components: the Core, Modules, Themes and the API - each of which needs to be updated individually. Up until 2020, the Form Tools website offered a simple Upgrade script which did the work of calculating exactly what packages you needed/wanted to update, and generate a custom zipfile of all the components. But alas, alack, due to hosting costs we had to downgrade the website, which meant we could no longer offer the upgrade functionality. We're very sorry! We miss it too!

Manual upgrade instructions

So instead, here's how you go about upgrading.

1. Check the unique version list

Most versions can be updated without special steps, but not all.

Take a look at the versions in the sidebar to the left. Those are special versions that required special installation steps. To be blunt, they are very old. You may just want to consider doing a fresh installation, but if you do want to update to the latest Form Tools version you'll need to upgrade to each of those versions one by one, before updating to the very latest version. See those pages for more information - but the steps below apply to any Form Tools version, so you'll need to repeat them for each of those versions.

2. Get the upgrade files

  1. Browse the list of modules and themes on the website to find those packages you want to upgrade. (To see the available versions, click on the Download buttons). For the available Core and API versions, visit the download page and click on those items.
  2. Download the appropriate versions from github. Github stores all the source code under the "Releases" area for each package.

3. Preparing files

  1. Unzip the packages, one by one. Modules and themes will contain a single folder named something like module-export_manager-3.3.0.
  2. For modules and themes, rename that folder to remove the module- or theme- prefix, and the -X.Y.Z suffix. In this example, the final folder should just be named export_manager.
  3. Don't worry about the API or Core folders. They don't need to be renamed.

4. Updating the files

  1. Before we do this next bit, backup your database and files. No, seriously! Yes, it's a pain but do it anyway.
  2. For this next part, we're going to overwrite the old files on your server. Generally this means FTPing of SFTPing the files and overwriting the old ones.
  3. First do the Core (if you're updating that part). For that, just overwrite the contents of those files on your server.
    Note that if this is a LOCAL installation, often operating systems will just remove entire folder and replace them with the new ones, so special files - like your all-important global/config.php file that contains all your settings - will be overwritten. So for local installations, overwriting the files folder by folder is the (slow and annoying!) way to go. For FTP/SFTP you can just drag & drop and it'll do a merge overwrite - keeping any files that already existed & weren't overwritten.
  4. For modules and themes, do the same. Find the /modules and /themes subfolders and overwrite their contents there.
  5. Lastly, the API is found in global/api. Again, just overwrite the files.
  6. Load up Form Tools in your browser and go to the Form Tools login page. You should see a "You've been upgraded to ..." message right away.
  7. Log in as the administrator and go to the Modules page. There, click the Upgrade button for all modules that require it.
  8. You're done!