We've been preparing for the port from v 1.8.x to 1.9.2 by testing the migration process out. There are even more reasons now why it's a good idea to migrate:

• In the process, we can move from mySQL 4 to 5 (better language support).
• We can move from MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables (more stable, faster, etc.).
• We can fix the character encoding issues plaguing the current version, which was set up with latin-1 tables and fields instead of utf-8.
• We can introduce a new fix we've tried which sorts the blog list alphabetically.
• We can add three minor bugfixes in Martin's customizations which have shown up in the process of testing.

The port itself is a complicated business, though. This is what we need to do:

1. Check the mySQL 5 db and see if we can configure it so that the defaults are InnoDB tables, and utf8_unicode_ci everywhere.
2. Take down the original PHP and archive it.
3. Do a mySQL dump of all the data, and make an archive copy.
4. Edit the dump, to do these replacements:
   • latin1 -> utf8
   • MyISAM -> InnoDB
5. Save the file as UTF-8 (although that doesn't help with accented characters :-(.)
6. Push up the edited dump into mySQL 5 to create the new db.
7. Put all the 1.9.2 code in place (including our customizations).
8. Configure the code to point at the new mySQL 5 db.
9. Run the B2Evo installer script. It will modify the db to add new fields required for 1.9.2.
10. Check that all is well (except for accented chars).
11. Go into the Mariage and Moses blog settings and fix the broken accented chars (this can be done using HTMLKit).
12. Test, test and test again.

This is best done on a weekend, for obvious reasons. We'll need an OK to do this on a weekend.