I bought a copy of xenForo when it first went on sale. I had it setup on my test server. During my server upgrades and general network maintenance window I upgraded the test server and took the old one offline. I moved the test site to one of the production server. That didn’t go well.

xenForo would not run. 500 errors for everything I did. I tried to upgrade it to xenForo RC 1 and while the installer recognized the xenForo database it didn’t give an option to upgrade. I could only do a clean install.

Since this was my personal playground I just blew it all up and started fresh. The first install didn’t work. It wouldn’t even start and there were no errors in the php log or the app pool logs. I turned on tracing for the site and while it told me the reason was a 500 error in the installer script it didn’t tell me which function. I could have tweaked the tracer config a bit to give me more info, but, since this was a test bed I shutoff tracing, download a new zip from xenForo and proceeded with the install.

The original zip I had must have been corrupt becuase the second attempt at the install worked without a hitch. I did try another upgrade on the original database and it was still a no go.

I imagine the problem is because of the differences in the 2 servers config. The old server was Windows 2003 32bit with 32bit mysql. The new server is Windows 2008R2 running 64bit php and mysql. Could be xenForo didn’t like the difference.

Anyway the install worked and my xenForo test bed is now open to all at https://test.admins.zone.

I have posted a few threads of things I like and dislike about xenForo on the site including a detailed review. So not to repeat myself here just head over to the xenForo test site.