Is it possible to revert to a previous version of Exhibit Builder?

I have a particular situation in which a previous employee did customization to theme and exhibit builder plugin, using php to skip the exhibit item page and call the item file directly into a javascript lightbox. However, in between their leaving and my arrival, the plugin was updated from version 2 to version 3, breaking this work-around and causing the lightbox display to break. I have a saved version of the customized plugin, but encounter an error when attempting to revert to the previous version of exhibit builder. The error I receive is:

exception 'Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli_Exception' with message 'Mysqli prepare error: Table 'cppdigitallibrary_omeka.omeka_exhibit_page_entries' doesn't exist' in /home/josephdavidanderson/omeka_dev/application/libraries/Zend/Db/Statement/Mysqli.php:77

I believe this may be because the database was altered with the installation of version 3, but am not sure. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to revert successfully to an older version of the plugin, so that the customization done by my predecessor can continue to work.

I'm happy to provide examples of the custom php layout files as well as the html generated if needed, but felt like it might be out of the scope of this inquiry for the time being.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Your suspicion is right -- there were many database changes going from version 2 to 3. There isn't really a mechanism for reverting from 3 to 2. If you have a copy of the old database, and there is no new data entered since going to 3, you might be able to recreate the exhibit builder tables and use the old exhibit builder code. But I would definitely advise against doing that on a production server.

On the other hand, it sounds like it might be easier and safer to try to recreate the customizations in the newer exhibit builder.

That's what I thought, thank you for confirming. There have been a number of changes to the database since, so I think you're right that trying to recreate the customization is the way to go.

Thanks again!

Hi,

I have close situation because I want to migrate from Exhibit builder 2 to Exhibit builder 3. Do I have to create all exhibits from the beginning to use the block approach or there is a migration code that can uploads all of these exhibits that built on older version to the new version? thanks

Upgrading the plugin in an installation should migrate existing exhibits.