When I did pass the update (installation) procedure, I was presented with another common problem - not being able to log-in into manager interface. The site was rendering OK, my database was upgraded (I think because all went OK) from beta 3 to beta 5 state.
I recon there’s a problem with sessions that prevented me to log in in FF or IE. So I tried altering the session_cookie_domain settings by hand (from .htacess) using the path I’ve created out of the wwwroot. (more details
here.) That didn’t help either, but didn’t hurt either.
I’ve also tried running another fresh installation in a subdirectory outside of wwwroot, using the same database with the other table prefix. Then I tried changing the config file to use the database prefix from the loaded and upgraded tables, instead of the fresh one.
This is my suggestion for making a tutorial - how to safely switch databases.
After that I had to revert back all the files from a snapshot and didn’t want to restore the tables from the time before upgrade. After putting all the files back, the site was rendering OK, so it seems that tables were not damaged. I was able to log into the manager again, though with a broken top menu interface.
