If someone remembers, then YouNetCo once sold a clone of the FB template. Then they removed this template from the store and motivated it by the fact that FB rights were violated. I had this template. Now they have again made a clone of FB on MetaFox - that now phpfox does not violate the rights of FB or was it a multi-move ...?
I also purchased YouNetCo's FB template quite some time ago. As I recall, I kept having problems with it, because the developer was slow to update it for each new phpFox release. Then I got a threatening email directly from Facebook's legal team, telling me to stop using the theme, or else! Well, after some time, I finally got an email from the FB template developer, informing me that he no longer supported it. Nice going! And now you say that are trying to sneak it back in again in V5? Crazy.
Well, JohnJr. it may have been $107 for you, but I am already running Ultimate with the two iOS and Android apps. So, in my case, I think we are talking about four times the amount that you paid ..... well, that is if I wanted to upgrade to V5, which I will not do for reasons you already know. Just updating my two apps costs a few hundred dollars.
It will takes several months of testing before I would go live. They did the same thing in V4. They had no real users beta testers. Instead they give it to the developers to test it out earlier, and most likely all they cared about at the moment is figuring out to get their app to work with the code changes, which is understandable.
I wasn't even on the demo site 20 minutes before I started seeing issues. So the next several months will be the beta testing in reality with them seeing what people don't complain about, which might save them some time and money on features they left out.
I like the new look, just like when V4 came out, but I feel like here we go all over again. V3 got down to about 28 bugs/issues at the time, and when version V4 came out we went up to about 178 or so.
I've been using PHPFox for several years now and bought it with life time license and updates,, I am pretty sure about it as I wouldn't have bought it if they had mentioned about recurring annual fee for updates. Now PHPFox support says it was never the case, I asked if they can share terms or screenshot of pricing from the past, and they don't have it.
To prove myself, I told them that I have been downloading latest version of PHPFox till date and never had to pay any upgrade fee annually, which itself proves that I had lifetime updates. Now I receive a response saying - "Clients who are out of the Product Upgrade period can still download the latest phpFox web source code, but we are going to restrict the code as per our policy very soon so you will not be able to find and download the source code of the next phpFox website versions anymore from the Client Area."
My concerns are:
1) If one was allowed to download latest phpFox even after product upgrade period then its unfair for those who are paying upgrade fee annually to get updates.
2) If PHPFox is restricting the code to be downloaded as per new policy then its unfair for those who bought PHPFox initially expecting to get life time updates.
Is it just me who is under the impression that I bought lifetime license with lifetime updates or do we have someone else in the same boat?
Just a quick update being as I just received an email notification regarding John's above comment. I am still using PHP 7.4.32 without any problems. I have no intentions of upgrading to PHP 8 any time soon. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it! Why look for trouble?
BTW, I have no intentions of upgrading to phpFox 5 either. It is just not worth the upgrade expense, or the trouble and the additional expense I would incur with updating my iOS and Android apps. Besides, my phpFox site is so dead with barely two dozen members now, I may just end up shutting it down in coming months anyway. Every month I delete more users who haven't logged on in six months or longer. Getting new users is hard. Retaining users and getting active participation is even harder. Too many folks are beholden to the major social networks.
aaannnndddd that's why I made sure I have recoverable backups before tinkering!
tried to do something before doing one iota of homework and broke my alpha playground.
So restores ... it's super simple. Blow away your top level site folder and then copy in the backup.
it's a tar archive, so whatever permissions were applied before should be intact when it's restored.
I got the "oops ... something went wrong" white page when I tried to apply the beta code, first pass.
Probably something I did, but we'll see? Anyways, had to restore finally. I left the DB untouched since the site
hadn't done a tinkle's darn thing. After putting the backup back up, I went through and did stuff on the site just to make sure.
here's exactly what I did to restore from the backup created above this time. Eventually I'll get around to doing it in the script too I guess ...
# mkdir metafox-restore
# cd metafox-restore
# gunzip -c ../metafox-2022-12-08.tar.gz | tar xf -
# cd /var/www/html/
# rm -rf *
# cd /root/metafox-restore
# cp -Rp * /var/www/html/
# php artisian cache:clear
It's icky and needs refinement. PLEASE!?! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS CUTE & CUDDLY be super duper careful doing stuff on your server! This has the dreaded rm -rf * command and that's the root of all evil. The peril that lies ahead may be too much for you. In that case, get your hosting support folks to help, get the phpfox folks to help or just don't do it!
Eventually folks will do a fancy backup/restore thingie like there is for v4 and it will make what I did look silly.
but there ya' go! backups and restores for MetaFox!
P.S. nobody told me to do the php artisian cache:clear command, I'm just throwing that in all by myself.
Other laravel sites I've run in the past needed that after anything was done too, so I'm just adding it.
It doesn't seem to throw any errors anywhere though ...?
I have the v4.8.10 release zip file still on my server, after downloading it accidentally.
Not sure if sharing this will upset the phpfox folks, and that's something I do NOT want to do!
Would helping Sean out and letting him (only him) have the v4.8.10 distribution upset things?
Unfortunately, phpFox V4 hasn't supported options for factory reset. Resetting the site may be complicated depending on what customizations have been made. We can give some general guidelines to reset the site:
- For settings, there are some setting types: global settings (of site and apps), user group settings, and user settings. To reset global settings of site and apps and user group settings, you need to run MySQL script to update the corresponding setting tables in the database.
- For changes in Core source files, you can upload source files from the original package of the same phpFox version.
- For changes in source files of Apps, you can install those apps in AdminCP
To manage countries and cities in phpFox V4, you can go to AdminCP > Globalization > Countries
you can check both check boxes and it gives the subscriber the option for auto payment or manual.. i guess if they miss the manual payment it goes to the 'on failure' group. I thought that this was how it worked, but never used the subscription app before and wanted to be sure.... yeah, V3 we could do 1st month free then payment on recurring
Bill, you are correct in that yours would be 20% (plus tax) of what your current license would cost now. I know any code changes would cost extra but you would have to look at the description of the upgrade at this URL
https://clients.phpfox.com/cart.php?gid=addons or Product Addons in your PhpFox client login. Mine says the following which I question about it not saying the free chat stuff in the description but they provided the link so it must be right. Here is the description for V4 Pro
phpFox Annual Upgrade - V4 Pro
This addon is for the annual update plan for phpFox V4 Pro license. The access to new phpFox versions will be kept in next 12 months.
So check your description for the Annual Upgrade for Ultimate so at least you will know. I have too many hacks to actually use V5 but I wanted it so I could at least try to help the forum if needed. I understand your frustration though...sorry. Winter is coming so I will be back inside in about a month if you still need help.
