Before upgrading, you should always read the changelog to see if something changed you should be aware of when upgrading.
To determine the version you are running, have a look in the HTML source of a Page generated by DokuWiki - there should be something like <meta name=“generator” content=“DokuWiki 2005-02-06” />.
The easiest way to upgrade is perform the following steps:
Hint: If you updated from an old version and don't have a login anymore you should check the file conf/local.php if there is the line
$conf['useacl'] = 1;
is missing. This mostly happens if you edited conf/dokuwiki.php instead of conf/local.php for your local settings. You should check the other entries in the old conf/dokuwiki.php too.
Here is a list of files that were removed in recent releases. You should check if they still exist in your install. If they do, delete them.
# removed in rc2008-03-31 inc/aspell.php inc/geshi/css-gen.cfg inc/lang/fr/admin_acl.txt lib/exe/spellcheck.php lib/images/toolbar/spellcheck.png lib/images/toolbar/spellnoerr.png lib/images/toolbar/spellstop.png lib/images/toolbar/spellwait.gif lib/plugins/acl/lang/ar/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/bg/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/ca/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/cs/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/da/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/de/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/el/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/en/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/es/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/et/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/eu/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/fi/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/fr/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/gl/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/he/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/id/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/it/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/ja/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/ko/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/lt/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/lv/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/nl/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/no/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/pl/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/pt/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/ru/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/sk/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/sr/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/sv/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/tr/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/uk/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/vi/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/zh/intro.txt lib/plugins/acl/lang/zh-tw/intro.txt lib/scripts/spellcheck.js lib/styles/spellcheck.css # removed in 2007-06-26 inc/parser/wiki.php lib/images/interwiki/bug.gif lib/plugins/base.php lib/plugins/plugin/inc lib/plugins/plugin/inc/tarlib.class.php lib/plugins/plugin/inc/zip.lib.php lib/scripts/domLib.js lib/scripts/domTT.js # removed in 2006-11-06 inc/admin_acl.php inc/lang/lt/stopwords.txt inc/magpie inc/magpie/rss_cache.inc inc/magpie/rss_fetch.inc inc/magpie/rss_parse.inc inc/magpie/rss_utils.inc lib/exe/media.php lib/tpl/default/mediaedit.php lib/tpl/default/media.php lib/tpl/default/mediaref.php # removed in 2006-03-09 data/pages/wiki/playground.txt inc/auth/ldap.php inc/auth/mysql.php inc/auth/pgsql.php inc/auth/plain.php inc/lang/ca/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/cs/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/da/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/de/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/en/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/et/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/eu/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/fr/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/it/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/ja/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/lt/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/lv/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/nl/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/no/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/pl/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/pt/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/vi/admin_acl.txt inc/lang/zh-tw/admin_acl.txt inc/parser/spamcheck.php lib/images/favicon.ico lib/images/thumbup.gif lib/images/toolbar/code.png lib/images/toolbar/empty.png lib/images/toolbar/extlink.png lib/images/toolbar/fonth1.png lib/images/toolbar/fonth2.png lib/images/toolbar/fonth3.png lib/images/toolbar/fonth4.png lib/images/toolbar/fonth5.png lib/images/toolbar/list.png lib/images/toolbar/list_ul.png lib/images/toolbar/rule.png lib/tpl/default/images/interwiki.png
People with shell access to their server can copy the text above and paste it into a file on the system, then run the following commands to check for and remove all those files. Only those that exist are removed. I used the filename of /tmp/removeold.txt to store the list of files copied from here.
for f in `cat /tmp/removeold.txt`
do
if [ -f $f ] ; then
ls -l $f
rm $f
fi
done
If you encounter some inconsistencies in DokuWiki's behaviour after upgrading, you should delete the cache files in data/cache/. You should make sure your browser hasn't cached old stylesheets or JavaScript by forcing a reload (Shift-F5 or Shift-R in most browsers).
Related pages that might apply:
Here are a few different Upgrade descriptions, provided by users. They might be slightly out of date.