Upgrading from Suma-2.9.x

Follow these instructions to upgrade from Suma 2.9.x to the latest Suma (3.x).

Running pre-2.9 Suma?

If you have Suma 2.8.x or older then you should first upgrade to the Suma 2.9.x version before undertaking the upgrade to Suma 3.0.

What will I notice?

Suma 3.0 introduced a lot of new features and quite a different underlying architecture to allow it to be more flexible and accommodate all sorts of new feature requests that I’ve received.  All of the existing 2.9 features are included in Suma 3.0 except the following:

  • Paid Subscription Plans no longer offer an initial payment feature.  This is to harmonized Suma with some other payment processors (other than PayPal) which we’ll be including in later releases which don’t support this feature.
  • Paid Subscription Plan Trial Periods have been simplified so that there are no billing cycles, just a trial period and trial frequency.

These restrictions will not affect any subscribers who may have already subscribed to plans with these features.

Other than that all the functionality is still there, and much more.

The 12 step program to Upgrade to Suma 3.0

Note 1. For a short period of time during this upgrade, Suma will be deactivated.  While deactivated it will not be protecting access to your content.  For this reason alone you shoul use a maintenance mode plugin (such as The Maintenance Mode plugin) to keep the public out of your site, but you should do this for another important reason.  Some upgrades can take 15-30 seconds on large datasets (lots of historical information in the database).  If a request arrives at your website during this time when the plugin hasn’t completed the schema conversion, it will launch another batch of conversion actions which will only interfere with the conversion already taking place.

Note 2. Suma 3.0 uses a different license manager than Suma 2.x.  Hence your old 2.9 license key won’t work.  You’ll need to obtain a new one (available here: Suma 2.9 Upgrade Licenses) and activate it once Suma 3.0 is installed.  If you upgrade but don’t activate a new key then your installation will only be operating in test mode not production mode.

  1. Admit Ensure that the database account used by Wordpress to access the database has DROP, CREATE and ALTER privileges.  The upgrade will not work without these.
  2. Backup all Suma database tables in the Wordpress database (i.e. those beginning with wp_Suma_*)
  3. Backup the Wordpress wp_options table because Suma will be updating its options that are saved there
  4. Backup all files currently in the suma plugin directory (i.e. wp-content/plugins/suma).
  5. Deactivate the Suma Plugin from the Wordpress Control Panel
  6. Remove all files from the Suma plugin directory.
  7. Copy the new Suma 3.x files into the suma plugin directory
  8. Activate the Suma Plugin
  9. Check the Suma Admin Event Log in the Dashboard area of Wordpress for any errors that may have been encountered during the installation
  10. If you have Suma 3.0 license keys then you should activate them from Suma’s Settings page
  11. If necessary, you should copy back any customizations you may have had in the suma plugin directory such as a suma_userforms.php file (which are now called suma_customization.php) or any changes to the suma.css file you might have done.
  12. Test that the installation is operating correctly.  As of Suma 3.0 you can now run Test mode alongside Production mode.  See this article for details: Test Mode Setting.

Upgrade complete.

See Also: