ActiveCodeline

Few days ago I had a task of upgrading Magento ver. 1.0.19870.1 to Magento ver. 1.1.1. When you are doing something like that on your own development machine, you probably don’t care much about backing up your database and installation folder. On my development machine I had a clean install of version 1.0.19870.1 where I merely entered few products, categories and other minor things. I had no other theme besides custom one. Before I was ready to do a update to real, shared, remote development machine I decided to test the update on my machine.

Performing local update went smoothly as it gets. On my surprise, everything work as it should be. I was convinced I can go and make upgrade to remote development machine. I had no SVN setup to my remote machine so all my code transfer was done trough FTP. Basically if you’re performing your upgrade trough full archive file all you need to do is copy content from archive to your root Magento installation and overwrite everything you’re asked to overwrite. Sound’s easy, doesn’t it? Well it is easy and your upgrade should go clean and without any glitch, that is if you are using built in theme. If you’re using a custom made theme, chances are you’re rune into trouble like i did. Read more…

Magento Magento, template, upgrade

If you look at Magento, or any other CMS system out there you can apply some basic logic to them. First of all, every system has some kind of configuration file. Every system stores it’s data (articles, posts and so on) inside the database. Every system has some content holder folder for storing stuff like images, pdf files, music and so on. Let’s look at WordPress as a comparison. WordPress uses “wp-config.php” to store relevant database information. Magento uses “app/etc/local.xml” to store relevant database information. Conclusion one: this is the first file you need to backup.

Next, let’s look a the their system files. Most of them if not all, do not change during their lifetime. Meaning, only few configuration files are subtle to change while other remain same as they were during the original archive package download.

To keep it short; in order to upgrade Magento you could do copy > replace on entire Magento installation aka root folder. The only thing you need to exclude is the “app/etc/local.xml” file. Read more…

Magento Magento, upgrade