Updating Visforms - Some things you should know

According to the motto "Never change a working system" many Joomla! administrators dread to run an update on a working installation, because they fear something might not work properly afterwards. Doing so they make there websites vulnarable to security risks and miss interesting new features that come with the update. In truth it's mostly a lack of experience in creating and restoring backups that prevents them from installing necessary and useful updates. We would like to encourage you strongly to seach this knowledge because it first, is essential for running a secure Joomla! Webseite and second it is not too difficult!

The easiest way to create backups of your website is using the free Joomla! extension Akeeba Backup. Akeeba Backup enables you to create full backups of your website including files, database and restoration script with one click. You can download the backup archive file and restore the website easily. It's immensly powerful to transfer websites to or from local test system or between providers as well. Please take your time and make yourself familiar with this extension.

Visforms Updates are stable and easy

Making Visforms updates as easy and stable as possible is our major aim. Therefore we spend a great deal of time and effort in developing flawless installation and update scripts and test our updates extensively on varying systems, improving the qualitity of our scripts continously.

Visforms supports Joomla! auto updates, thus, updates are discovered and indicated in the administration of your website and you can install the update directly via your extension manager. Sadly, when using the Joomla! auto updater, only the last update is installed. So, if you have skipped an update, as soon as a new update is available only this last update will be installed, when you click the update button. This can cause problems, especially, if the update which you have skipped, runs some code that changes the database (and which you obviously missed) your website will most probably work no longer properly.

We have covered this problem with Visforms. The Visforms update script performs step by step every change made between your installed version and the update's version, no matter which update version you choose. This ensures that you can always update in only one step instead of installing all versions released between your current version and your desired update version step by step (always worrying if you might have forgotten one important step). Just download the desired version and install it or install the latest update which is displayed in the update manager.

Always create a backup before you start

Although Visforms tries to provide a maximum of security an comfort there is always the posiblity that something goes wrong. That is why you should always create a backup (see above) before you start and make sure that you are able of restoring your website from this backup. (This is also true for any Joomla! core update or any update of any other extenstion).

It's even more save to test the update process on a copy of your website (created in a subfolder on your webspace or on a local test system using Akeeba Backup or any other backup tool).

Log file

Visforms create a log file during installation/update that logs important informations about the installation/update, especially installation/update errors, which do not cause the installation/update to abort. The log file can help to find those errors and fix the installation. If you make the file available for us (in case there where problems during installation/update), we can even try to improve Visforms according to that information.

Usually there is a stable version and a beta version/release candidate

We continuously develop and extend Visforms. That is, why there is usually a stable version and a beta version available. While the stable version is for save use on productive systems, it will be less feature rich than the beta version/release candidate, which you should test thoroughly before using it on a productive system. Only the stable version is distributed with the Joomla! auto updater., so that you will only be informed about stable updates by automatic actions. As soon as the beta version/release candidate is declared stable, it will be added to the update channel for stable updates. The next bunch of new features will create a new beta version/release candidate. Beta versions or release candidates are only available on the download menu of this website.

Template Overrides and Visforms Updates

The development of new features sometime requires profound code refactoring and changes of the view files. Therefore template overrides created on the basis of a specific Visforms version, may no longer work properly after a Visforms update. You have to adapt your template overrides to the changed view files. If template overrides have to be adapted after an update, Visforms will display a message after the update is complete.

Known Problems

After updating to Visforms Joomla! 3.5.0 the Recaptcha V2 is missing

Solution: Update to Visforms 3.6.11

After updating to Visforms 3.5.x all fields are missing in frontend form view

Cause: The new layouts folder was not copied during undate.

Solution: Copy the layouts folder manually to your server.

Unzip the installation package.

Copy the folder

site/layouts

components/com_visforms

After updating to Visforms Joomla! 3.8.12 or higher using Redirect Url and "Allow Url Parameters" to set user inputs made in one form as default values in an other form does no longer work.

Please check out the documentation Using Url Parameter to set default Values in Forms and Forum Post "Allow URL parameters" does not work anymore in order to learn how to fix the problem.

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