big boarders who went from 3.0.x to 3.5.x how did ya do it?
 

I would love to hear some examples of how you big board folks did your major upgrade from 3.0.x to 3.5.x

My board is not quite "big board" yet but it's getting close, and I am faced with upgrading to 3.5 with minimal disruption. As you can imagine my 3.0.6 board over the years has been hacked and modded quite a bit.

Thanks for any tips!

It was fairly easy for me ... the installation steps all works as advertised. I just had to remodify all my templates. A few of the installation steps bombed out, but refreshing the install script picked up right where it left of.

I didn't plan mine very well and had 4 days downtime. :) But 3.5 is working well.

It was a nightmare ^.^

The upgrade itself went smooth with only 2 errors (due to modified schema which I had overlooked), but getting all the hacks working again ...

Also, I accidently killed the whole database ... and restorig some 60 million recorsds from a dump and doing the upgrade process again caused approx 1/2 day downtime.
So in fact it was down for almost 2 days, instead of the one that was planned.

Down for about 10/15 minutes, had it all planned out, and did all the software and template changes on our test forum first, so just had to copy them over.

Like Paul_M I practiced first on test forums but I still spent over 20 hours if you include the test forums. Basically none of the old hacks worked but the good news is there are new plugin hacks to replace them. I had also changed many of the templates and with the new features in 3.5.X I had to start over with most of the templates re-adding the changes. I use several different styles so it was time consuming.

Our site is also integrated into vBulletin so I had to change a lot of the code I was using addressing the database. More good news is 3.5.X code is much better if you are using vBulletin as a backbone for your site. Again most of my templates had to be upgraded before 3.5.X would work properly.

With the addition of hooks and plugins vBulletin is a lot easier to alter and debug. The ajax features alone are worth the upgrade not to mention all the other enhancements.

Same as paul, just down for 4 hours because of rebuilding all counters...

everything should be done on a testboard first

Made the template on a test forum installation, then upgraded everything.

i'm still working on my test boards; far too meny hacks to port/reinstall and get working before i can do the upgrade...

Sure, so did I - but just the upgrade scripts took approx. 2h + 1/2 h for building FULLTEXT + 1/2h to dump, gzip & tar the DB + .. +