Upgrade attempt: Fail, Fail, Fail

[fraenkiman]

Hello jp123,

welcome to the FlatPress Support Forum.
The FlatPress CMS relies on PHP and the Smarty template engine. The ongoing development of PHP and Smarty determines the pace and scope of the changes.

As soon as you ignore PHP and/or Smarty updates across multiple FlatPress versions, you’ll eventually end up with a lot of catching up to do and a backlog of maintenance tasks. We relied on Smarty 2.6 for a very long time, which ultimately cost us a lot of time to get back on track.

For major version updates, I recommend “backing up only the user-generated content” from the old instance and copying it to a new FlatPress instance.

Afterward, you can check whether your custom theme still works. If not, some members here in the community have had good results migrating older themes to the new FlatPress/ Smarty.

Last but not least, copy your own plugins into the new instance; however, don't activate them all at once—activate them one at a time.

Best regards,
Frank

[jp123]

It definitely sounds like you've run into the classic documentation loop—every page points to another page without actually explaining the migration path. Since 1.2.1 is several major versions behind, there may be undocumented database/content format changes that make a direct upgrade unreliable. If your current install is stable, I'd be hesitant to force the upgrade without first testing on a copy of your site.

One thing that has helped me with migration projects like this is breaking the process into small checkpoints and documenting each successful step as I go. Oddly enough, I started doing that after reading an article on organizing repetitive not FlatPress-related workflow organization guide, and it's made troubleshooting much less painful. Hopefully someone who's upgraded directly from 1.2.1 can share the exact sequence—it would certainly fill a gap in the current documentation.