Converting a bridged phpbb2 cpg13.x to phpbb3 and 14.x

[RonS]

Hi,

I seem to be in over my head.  I had a bridged phpbb2 -> 1.3.x installation.
The phpbb2 installation is at http://forum.domain.com/ and the CPG 1.3 is at http://photos.domain.com/
I know that I have read this is a troublesome combination, but I guess back a few years ago I was "an expert" an was able to get the two integrated.
The gallery is tracking a little more than 35,000 original files.  There are about 4,000 phpBB users and about 1,000 of them have uploaded files.

I have upgraded to phpbb3 successfully and I am now attempting to upgrade CPG and bridge the two.

After dumping my DB, and copying all new CPG files including the proper phpbb3 bridge from http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php/topic,53678.0.html
I run update.php and all seems fine, either done before or OK. 

I get redirected from http://photos.domain.com/ to http://www.domain.com/photos.  I have no idea how this is happening, as nowhere ever have I entered such a URL.
I can then log into the photo gallery and get to the admin tools.

When I try to run the bridging manager, I get "There was an error while processing a database query" and I get logged out.
I can not login again, I just keep getting returned to the home page.

I've tried a bunch of things, including enabling the forum to be seen from http://www.domain.com/forum and the photo gallery similarly.
I have reloaded the old DB and rerun update.php several times.
I have droppped all cookies from my domain, and restarted firefox, and I have truncated the sessions table.  This does allow me to log in, but after trying the bridging manager again I am hosed.  I had noticed multiple sessions for my user_id. 

I have rolled back all of the changes to software and DB after working overnight on this, and cpg and and the old version of phpBB2 are still integrated, and users with a cookie are still able to login to CPG for some reason, so some things are working, just barely, for the time being.

So here's the issue and my request, and I realize I'm not posting the required info, and I apologize up front for doing this in public, but there's no PM system working.

Given the situation, I don't really want to publicly identify my domain here.  I'd be willing to compensate one of the devs to help get me up and running -- integrated with phpbb3 and seen by photos.domain.com and forum.domain.com, as long as the amount is within reason.  Please drop me an email so we may discuss?
Thanks.

[Joachim Müller]

Read the sticky on this very sub-board (the one that is misleadingly named "When requesting bridge support - mandatory!" for no apparent reason ) and do exactly as suggested there. The word "exactly" is meant as bold and important as it possibly could be.

[RonS]

Yes, I clearly stated

I realize I'm not posting the required info, and I apologize up front for doing this

The installation is rolled back; the information you require is impossible for me to leave.

So unless I am  A) willing to identify my site in public, B) Leave it in a completely unfunctional state for an inderterminate amount of time none of the devs are willing to be paid to help?

Very cool.

[phill104]

Shall I move this to the freelancers section of the board?

We are willing to help for free in this section but we need to be able to see what is going on.

[Joachim Müller]

So you want generic advice? OK:

• Backup both your forum as well as your gallery both on file system level and database level so you can savely go back in case something goes wrong
• Put your gallery into offline mode (aka maintenance mode). This is meant to make sure that your users don't perform changes (uploads, comments etc) while you upgrade
• Unbridge
• Upgrade coppermine as suggested in the docs
• Upgrade your forum from phpbb2 to phpbb3 doing whatever it takes to do that (we don't know nor care)
• Make sure both apps work as expected after the upgrade in standalone mode
• As the bridge for phpbb3 doesn't come with the cpg1.4.x package, but comes as a separate download you should download that bridge file
• Finally run the bridge manager built into cpg1.4.x to re-bridge the two apps
• Turn off coppermine's maintenance mode