Successful Magento Upgrade Strategies
Planning a successful Magento Enterprise Upgrade.
Magento is a very complex and powerful shopping cart system. Customization comes at a price however, when it comes time to upgrade to the latest version of the platform. We’ve listed a few strategies below that have helped us plan, test and successfully upgrade clients with the least amount of headaches.
1.) Get a list of every custom features that you have worked on in your system. This is extremely important for testing, because it forces you to not only test your plugins and checkout procedures, but also the overlooked customizations.
2.) Mirror your production environment into a cloud server. When testing, have employees or even family members test the site. They are not familiar with the site so they may spot issues that you have overlooked from regular use of the website.
3.) Change list. Start a folder of updates that mirrors the Magento folder structure. Put any fixed/modified files into this folder structure. This makes the upgrade very quick, since after performing the core magento upgrade, you can simple copy these fixed files OVER the production files and instantly have it fixed.
4.) Test..Test and retest.
5.) If you have purchased any plugins from companies, have their login and support information on hand in case something goes wrong with the upgrade or something unanticipated happens.
6.) Upgrade downtime: If you expect the upgrade to only take one hour, double your upgrade window just in case. Anything that can happen during a production upgrade WILL happen.
7.) Be patient. Watching the upgrade SQL commands on the database will drive you crazy trying to anticipate when the upgrade will be complete. An upgrade from a Magento EE 1.10 to an EE 1.13 took about two hours to complete.
Once you have your upgrade strategy down, try and keep doing it every point release. Your upgrade cycle will be a lot easier to handle rather than having to jump through several releases.
If you need any professional help in planning your upgrade do not hesitate to Contact Us for more information.