The development of our Email Marketing software is ongoing, and we release frequent updates, containing bug fixes, design changes, and new and redesigned features. Upgrades are seamless and automatic for users of our hosted platform, but if you have downloaded the software and installed it on your own server, you’ll need to perform upgrades manually.
To upgrade your software, you will need to first know three important pieces of information:
- Your activecampaign.com account login information. You should have received this information in an email when you originally purchased your software license.
- Your Email Marketing software’s admin password. This is the password that you use to log in to your Email Marketing software with the user name of admin.
- Your server’s FTP connection information. You will need FTP access to the directory on your server in which the software files reside. Usually, your FTP information will consist of three things: a host name, user name, and password.
Once you have obtained the above information, upgrading your Email Marketing software installation consists of four easy steps — backing-up your files and database, downloading the latest version of the software, uploading the new files to your server, and running updater.php through your browser.
Backing-Up Your Software
This is a very important step that we always recommend you take before upgrading, or changing your software installation in any way. Backing-up your software is a two-part process. You must first make sure to back-up the actual software files located on your web server’s file system. You can log in to the server through FTP and download the software files, or log in to the server through the command line or another type of file management application to make a copy of the Email Marketing folder.
Once you have made a back-up of your files, you will also want to make a back-up of your entire MySQL database, by exporting all of your tables’ structure and data in to an .sql file. If you have a small database, this can be done through a web application such as PHPmyAdmin — however, we recommend that you make a back-up of the MySQL database through a command line command on your server.
If you are unsure of how to back-up either your files or your MySQL database, contact your server administrator, and they should be able to assist you with this task.
Download The Latest Version
Now that you have backed-up your software, you will need to log in to our website to download the latest version of the software. You can log in to activecampaign.com by following this link:
http://www.activecampaign.com/account
Once you have logged in to our website, you should see a link to view and download your purchased product(s). Your software files will be downloaded as a single .zip file.
If your Support & Upgrades Contract for your license has expired, you will see the option to renew it — you must have a valid Support & Upgrades Contract in order to access and use the latest version of our software.
Uploading The New Files To Your Server
Now that you have downloaded the .zip file containing the newest software distribution, you will want to extract/unzip that .zip file on to your desktop computer. Once the file has been extracted, you will see a folder with several other files and directories within it.
Now you will want to connect to your server through FTP using an FTP client, and upload all of the new software files directly over the existing software files on your server. Make sure that you set your FTP client to overwrite all existing files. This will not cause you to lose any data or settings, but if you have made any of your own changes to any of the software files (such as customizing the HTML templates or PHP code), those changes will be lost, and you will have to reinstate them after the upgrade.
Make sure that you DO NOT delete the older version files from your server before uploading the new files. Doing so will cause important database configuration files to be lost (as well as any user-uploaded images), and will cause the software to cease functioning.
Note: You can of course use a different method of uploading files (other than FTP) to your server if you’d like. However, make sure that all files are uploaded properly, all existing files are overwritten, and no files are deleted beforehand.
Running Updater.php
Now that you have finished uploading all of the new software files to your server, simply open your software login page in your browser. You should see a message prompting you to run updater.php. Click the “updater.php” link that you see, and you will be taken to the admin/updater.php page in your browser. You will be asked to log in using your admin password, and you will also be asked for your product serial number (in newer versions of the software, the serial number should be entered automatically).
Simply follow the steps you see on the updater.php page, and click Next after each step has completed. You will see a progress bar notifying you that the update process is running, and you should be able to click “Show details” to see which specific tables in your database are being updated.
Depending on your server, the amount of data you have, and the version you are upgrading from, the upgrade process could take anywhere between a few seconds to a few hours to complete. When the updater.php page has finished applying all of the necessary changes to your database, you will see a message saying “Upgrade complete!” and you will be prompted to log in to your administrative interface.
Uncomfortable With Upgrading Your Own Software?
If you are uncomfortable with performing your own manual software upgrades, a member of our support staff can perform the upgrade for you for a small fee. You can fill out an Upgrade Request on the Contact Support page, and we would be happy to assist you. To submit an Upgrade Request now, click here.
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