Make a full backup of your website's database. Don't rely on myPHPNuke's tabledump only. Although the developers are familiar with the tabledump utility and we have been able to create complete backups of our myPHPNuke drivev sites, we also know from experience that unstable server setups or limited bandwidth can cause incomplete backups. If you know how to check whether the backupfile that the tabledump utility creates is complete, you can rely on the tabledump utility.

When you are not so familiar with the structure of a sql tabledump file, we advise you to use phpMyAdmin or better, use the database backup facilities that your hosting provider offers you via shell access. When your hosting provider doesn't provide you with seperate database backup tools, use phpMyAdmin. Make sure that you have a very stable connection to the Internet and that the backup phpMyAdmin creates is complete. You can check the backup file by opening it in your programmer's editor and check if all the myPHPNuke tables of your database are available. You can identify the myPHPNuke table by the prefix that your website uses (by default the prefix is "mpn_").

Most of the time, people (and you will very likely be one of them) make small changes to the original files of myPHPNuke. That's fine, but, as all of the files in version 1.8.8_8 are changed, chances are big that you will loose your modifications. Therefor, it's advised that you make sure that you have an up-to-date set of your modifications from the host's machine. With this up-to-date backup of scripts, you can re-apply your changes when still needed to the new scripts of 1.8.8_8 after testing the new version. For a detailed list of code changes that are necessary to let your own scripts run inside myPHPNuke version 1.8.8_8, please refer to appendix 8, "Upgrade your code to myPHPNuke 1.8.8_8".

Create a new directory on your local machine. Extract all the files from the distributionkit (it's available in Windows Zip format and Unix tar.gz format) into this new directory (don't overwrite your existing directories, if you do so, you loose all your modifications and configuration files!

The distributionkit contains empty config files. You need to copy the following config files from your existing website to the corresponding directories on your local machine:

myPHPNuke uses a prefix for every table name in the database. By doing so, it's easy for you to install and use several copies of myPHPNuke even when you have only one database account at your shared hosting account. Just give each group of tables that belong to a different install another tablename prefix.

Because of this, not every user is running his database with the standard tablename prefix of 'mpn_'. So, please verify the tablename prefix of the database that you are going to use with this install and modify it in the file dbconf.php which is in the root of the website.

Upload all files and directories from the new install directory on your local machine to the host machine.

Re-apply all chmod settings on directories and files as instructed in the next section of the manual because they get lost most of the time when using an ftp program (they get the default values of the host machine).

There are no database changes between version 1.8.8_7 and 1.8.8_8 but when you upgrade from an older version, it's good to run the install script again to make sure that all necessary table structure modifications are applied. To be able to run the install scripts, you need to keep your database name and password at hand.