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A few years ago, I built a new website (www.RavenFallsPhotography.com) using CE3. Although it was a massive pain to set it up, thanks to a lot of help from people here (especially Rod Barbee), I was able to complete a website with which I was very pleased.
...Until, of course, my hosting provider decided, without warning, to ditch all support for PHP 5.6 and anything else below 7.0. Now, my site prints error-code gibberish at the top of each gallery page...and, worse, the shopping cart is DOA. Combined, they mean that not only can't I sell prints from my site, but the whole thing looks like something that got abandoned years ago. Not good!
So, it looks like I need to bite the bullet and move to BL2, but I have several questions:
1) Can I do everything I've currently done on my site in BL2? You're invited to check my site at the link, ignoring the error messages and other issues. To give some perspective: in CE3, I was using the full Blog & Galleries bundle, plus Cart, Pages, Stage, and GallerySearch. Looking at the BL2 add-ons for sale, I can only find a few of those. Is the full capability I would need still there?
2) What is the most painless way to upgrade? I understand it's likely I'll have to redo lots of the work from scratch, but what are the ways I could minimize that? I see other threads that suggest the best way is first to upgrade from CE3 to CE4, and then move on to BL2 from there, but I don't have CE4, and don't see any way to get it nowadays. In any event, even if I could, what would be the initial process to upgrade from CE3 to CE4?
These are my initial questions (although I'm sure I'll have more once I get answers to these). The bottom line is that I really liked the site I built with CE3, and the convenience of maintaining the galleries via LR, but obviously I don't see any way to hack CE3's code so it "plays nice" with PHP 7.3. At the moment, I'm just trying to figure out if it's possible to stay in TTG's ecosystem, or whether I need to reconcile myself to a pay-by-the-month service like SquareSpace or Smugmug. Thanks for any information you can give me.
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1) yes. you can do all those things. Stage is now Theater. There are WordPress and Cart add-ons. Backlight creates pages as well as albums and search is integrated.
And Backlight is soooooo much faster and easier to design in than the Lightroom Web Module
2)Send an email to Matt from the contact form on the support page and ask him about getting CE4 Publisher. (this assumes you are currently using CE3 Publisher)
I've posted some tips on upgrading from CE4 using Publisher: https://ttg-tips-and-tricks.barbeephoto … backlight/
And CE4 that's not using Publisher: https://ttg-tips-and-tricks.barbeephoto … backlight/
Here is the documentation on going from CE3 Publisher to CE4 Publisher: http://ce4.theturninggate.net/docs/doku … ce3_to_ce4
If your CE3 site was not using Publisher (exported and uploaded galleries), then I'm afraid you'll be stuck with starting from scratch, recreating your old galleries as Publisher albums.
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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Thanks. I'll send off that e-mail A.S.A.P.
I'm still a bit confused on what I'll be needing. Although I used Stage in my previous website, it appears it was for additional pages that didn't correspond to the usual things you'd find on a photo website -- for example, the "articles" section or the page describing my book. The description of Theater makes it seem to be more a multi-media presentation tool. Would I still need it for the "extra" pages of the type I described above, or would that functionality be built into BL2 as is?
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Just to make a page like /books you don't need anything. You can do this with BL2. Apart of BL2, I think you'll need the Wordpress and the Cart modules. If you discover down the road that you want/need Stage, you always can add it then.
Daniel Leu | Photography
DanielLeu.com
My digital playground (eg, Backlight tips&tricks): lab.DanielLeu.com
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