I am an amateur SilverStripe hack and I am in a mess.

Background: About three years ago, I put together a website for our church using SS (V2.3.4). It has served us well.
However, I did not upgrade the SS base code. It was working well and I did not have the time to improve the site.

A few days ago our web hosting company upgraded PHP to the latest verson (5.4) and our website went down hard. I suspect either the SS core and/or the and extensions clashed with PHP 5.4.

Since I do not know PHP, I decided to rebuild the site instead of fixing code I do not understand.

Attempt #1: I decided that starting a new SS build (V3.0.5). The new SS build works with a new DB and with my template. But when i link it to the existing Database, the site crashes (I believe the crash is a simple white screen with no error message - I may need to run it again, to record any error message). I cannot get to the original web content.

Attempt #2: I decided to pull the original website down to my laptop and run it local via WampServer. I can dial back the PHP to an older version. I have a generic SS V2,3,4 running in one folder. When I started the church website via WampServer, I got this error:
"[Warning] mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user 'sbtindyo_smitty'@'localhost' (using password: YES)"
So I suspect the SQL database is not copied to the local WampServer

Attempt #3: I exported the MySQL database from the original church website. However, Wampserver has a 2Mb limit on importing databases. As luck would have it, the database I have is 5.5Mb in size.

At this time all I want to do is to bring up the website one more time to copy the content to our new SS build. There has to be a better way.

I am open to any suggestions.

-WittySmitty

I normally use http://www.heidisql.com/ to copy dbs locally on windows... it has an export feature that you can select a DB and it will duplicate the DB there (either server to localhost or reverse)

I believe the error "[Warning] mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user 'sbtindyo_smitty'@'localhost' (using password: YES)" means that you database config isn't setup properly. Open up the _config.php file in the mysite folder. You should see something that looks like

$databaseConfig = array(
            "type" => 'MySQLDatabase',
            "server" => 'localhost',
            "username" => 'db-username',
            "password" => 'db-password',
            "database" => 'db-name',
            "path" => '',
    );

You'll want to make sure the username, password, and database are all set correctly for your local wamp server.