How to Update Concrete5 (after you tried and it didn't work!)

Nov 13, 2012

concrete 5 cms

Most of us don't want to upgrade anything until we absolutely have to, or at least until someone else has sweated through and worked out all the bugs that come with the new version. Concrete5 is a great content management system with a ton of great features, but doing your own site backups and version upgrades can be a little intimidating and frustrating! As of this posting, the most up-to-date version of Concrete5 is 5.6.0.2, after 5.5 about a year ago; and if your site is running on version 5.4 or older, you won't be able to upgrade to the latest version without upgrading to a second or third latest version first.

So, you've logged into your dashboard and under "Systems and Settings>Backup and Restore," make sure you do a site backup before you try anything. (it's probably not a bad idea to do a site backup every few months anyway just for fun) Next, clicking on "Update Concrete5" will show you what version you're site is currently using, and what newer versions are available, as well as which version you need to upgrade to first.

If your site was built on Concrete5 more than a year ago and there's a problem after doing the update

Turns out some of the older templates don't take to the new automatic updates as smoothly as one would have hoped. If you followed the instructions to update Concrete5 to version 5.5.2.1 and now you can't log in to your dashboard, don't panic! If you or someone you know can access your site's FTP files, there's just one small change you need to make:

  1. Open/log in to your FTP file manager. Look for a folder named "Themes;" sometimes it may be within a folder called "Packages."
  2. Now find and click on the folder named "elements." The file you're going to tweak is named "footer.php" and you can right-click your mouse to open and edit it.
  3. Just before the last </body> tag, add this piece of code:
    <?php Loader::element('footer_required'); ?>
  4. Save you changes to the footer.php file, refresh your browser and that's it! You should be all set to log back in to your site.

You may also want to clear your site's cache within Concrete5's dashboard (which you should now be able to see) under "Systems and Settings>Backup and Restore>Optimization." You can always still access your dashboard with this link: http://www.yourdomainnamehere.com/index.php/dashboard/

For more C5 troubleshooting help, search the Concrete5 forums.


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