By PaleBlueDot

I have seen a lot of people state they have completed a clean installation, but that is not always the case. A clean install will help with many database issues including foreach() errors.

To complete a truly clean install of fireboard, you need to do more than just uninstall the component. Here is my guide to a completely clean installation. If you are not familiar with database operations, I highly recommend trying this out on a test site before trying it on your actual site.

1. Uninstall your old component.

2. Backup your ENTIRE Joomla database. Even if you are only plan on dropping previous Fireboard tables, you should back up everything in case you drop something you didn't want to by mistake. You can backup using PHPMyAdmin or CPanel if you have it. Your webhost may provide other methods for backup as well.

3a (OPTIONAL). If you wish to re-import your fireboard messages/categories, etc then launch PHPMyAdmin, select your database from the list and click the “Export” tab.

3b (OPTIONAL). Highlight all of the Fireboard tables (those beginning with jos_fb_) by default, choose either Zip or GZip compression and click “Go”. This should initiate a file download of your SQL tables.

4a. Drop your Fireboard tables.

4b. Select the “Structure” tab in PHPMyAdmin and tick the checkbox next to each of the fireboard tables (those beginning with jos_fb_). At the bottom of all the tables, from the drop-down box, select “Drop”. You will then be presented with a confirmation box for your selection. Hit yes if this is correct.

5. Install Fireboard as you would any normal component.

6. Make sure you see the following dialog box when launching Fireboard for this first time. If you do not, you have not dropped the old tables properly.

7 (OPTIONAL-See Step 3). If you backed up your Fireboard tables, click on “Import” from PHPMyAdmin. Browse to the location of the zip file you downloaded and click “Go.”

Congrats, you have a completely CLEAN installation of Fireboard.

Additional Information

By Miro Dietiker

As long as no column gets added in between the deleted and the restored version, anything gets fine. But this is NOT THE CASE in most situations.

To get a perfect working howto, do on each jos_fb_ export the following properties: - NO Structure (option) - Data: COMPLETE INSERTS (check this option, MOST IMPORTANT) - Data: Extended Inserts (to get much smaller export file)

Now, when a column gets added, the inserts won't break! NO ALTER required anymore! (except when containing before columns that are removed later on… When you get an error on import such as “column 'image' missing on table jos_fb_categories”, simply add it for the duration of import and delete it afterwards again…)

In any other case (when not deleting the entire Database), you need to verify structure column by column… and you don't have to do any mistake…

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