A quick update to report that there have been many useful enhancements to the Mihalism image hosting system recently.  The backend continues to improve with many new options.  This solution is moving fast and may soon provide a good alternative to imagevenue, tinypic and the other traditional providers.  Soon everyone will be able to run a hosting solution :-)

Here’s the changelog:

1. More bug fixes to help improve stability and reliability.
2. Fixed Webpage URL Upload not posting to “Upload To” album.
3. Cleaned up code base to make it easier to edit & understand for mod developers.
4. Added wildcard IP address bans. Example: 123.456.*.* or 123.456.321.*.
5. Fixed random string generator not outputting correct value.
6. Improved stability of new URL upload options.
7. Fixed Imagick issue with thumbnails.
8. Fixed iFrame uploader not working.
9. Fix Internet Explorer 6 warning slideout returning false positives created by Internet Explorer 8.
10. Added “Advanced Debugging Tools” to Site Settings page. Basically linking hidden debugging pages.
11. Added page to Admin Control Panel to show recent PHP error logs to help debugging.
12. Added page to Admin Control Panel to show System Information such as hard drive space remaining, RAM use, and more.
13. Converted MySQL Driver to use MYSQL_*_TABLE constants for easier table renaming when using multiple sites.
14. The design of Advanced Thumbnails has changed for people with the most recent version of Imagick Image Library.
15. And a few more minor updates, tweaks, and changes.

Get it here.

I have been running a small hosting solution for my projects for a while using the Mihalism Multi Host software. I really like this little piece of software and I was surprised to hear that development had been halted after version 4. Luckily the developers are back in action and have just released version 5, which is available here.

The trouble is, for people like me who need to upgrade from version 3, there is no upgrade script from v 3.1 to 5.0. One needs to first upgrade to version 4. This is what I just did and I thought I would share how to do it as the developers are providing support for version 4 users but not currently to version 3 users.

First step

As a first step I did a backup of the whole folder where the Mihalism and the images reside.  In my case it was the /hosting folder:

tar -czvf images_backup.tar.gz hosting/

Then I did a backup of my whole sql database, using MyPhpAdmin.

Second step

I downloaded the v 3 to v 4 upgrade script, which is available here. I am also hosting a copy here:  multihost_3_1_0.

I unzipped the file, which gave me a folder called “upgrade”.

I downloaded version 4.0.2 of Mihalism Multi Host from their official website.  I unzipped it and uploaded the resulting folder on my server.  I called this new folder “hosting2″.

I then uploaded the upgrade folder into hosting2.

Third step

I copied the following from my old Mihalism version 3 (folder hosting) in my new Mihalism version 4 (folder hosting2):

- the files folder and its contents;

- the config.php file.

I then ran the upgrader by accessing /hosting2/upgrade/ from my web browser.  The upgrade went smoothly except for the upgrader’s inability to overwrite my config.php file:

Now that was not much of a problem, as the upgrader gave me instructions on how to update the file.  Or so I thought.  Actually, the file it was attempting to write was not hosting2/config.php (the one I had moved over from my previous version) but hosting2/source/includes/config.php.

I edited that file as per the instructions, I changed the name of my new version from hosting2 to hosting so that links to my legacy  files would not be lost.  I then deleted the upgrade folder and the install.php file and I was done!

I just did it and it seems to be working all right!

M

Update: I have now updated from v3 to v5. Everything works perfectly!