Sitefinity upgrade with hotfixes?

Question

Just getting ready to upgrade from 5.1 to 6.3. We have never performed an upgrade before.

About the upgrade path: When installing the updates, do I need to install the hotfixes, or just the major releases? (My gut says only major releases).

I found the documentation here: http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/documentationarticles/upgrading-you-sitefinity-5.1-project-to-the-latest-version

Is this documentation enough to make a smooth upgrade?

Answer 1

Yeah, just follow the documentation in the link you posted.

My process is to take full backups of the site files and database then perform the upgrade locally. Do the first step in the upgrade path then run through the site to test, back end and front end, then run the next step in the upgrade, and so on. I suppose if you want to be extra careful you could take additional backups between each upgrade step but that's probably overkill.

When making the web.config changes, there is an option to have Project Manager merge them for you but I end up just using Beyond Compare to compare the _EmptyProject folder in the extracted Project Manger files to my local files and do the web.config changes through a file compare. It cuts down on the differences in files from upgrade to upgrade and shows you whats been changed. The _EmptyProject folder is essentially the vanilla Sitefinty site files for that version.

Once the site is fully upgraded locally, I just publish the site in Visual Studio, copy the files over to the live site and overwrite the live database with a backup of my locally upgraded database.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

I have upgraded Sitefinity 5.1 to 6.0, on a website which is in production (which included going through a couple of steps for the versions between).

I just followed the guidelines, and it went fine.

Now there are a couple of things you need to be aware of :

• Source control

If your Sitefinity solution is on "Source Control", you should create a new duplicate of your solution, and disconnect this one(newly created) from "Source Control" before starting the upgrade. And of course you do the upgrade on the solution which is not in Source Control. Because you will probably have a lot of dll's to integrate, and if you have the project manager, your sitefinity project will run correctly, even though the new dll's aren't properly integrated in your solution and possibly "source control".

• Unexpected behaviours of previously working elements

Secondly, I didn't test the frontend and backend during the different steps (Sitefinity versions within upgrade), but I tested everything once my solution had reached the last Sitefinity version. I thought I had checked everything, but it wasn't the case, and some of my custom Widgets didn't work properly on the latest version of Sitefinity. Next time I'll go more in detail on all custom parts, since from a working version of Sitefinity, you can end up with a newer version that breaks some behaviours. If you notice this, you might better wait a bit more for a fix, or the next release which might fix the problems.

• Outside access to website during upgrade.

Furthermore, once you need to do the upgrade on the production database/website, the website shouldn't be accessed by people, since the upgrade of database might take some time.

• Time needed for upgrading everything

One more thing I would like to add, it takes time to perform upgrade of several versions. The first time I upgraded (I needed to go through 2 versions), and having to upgrade locally, to a development database, deploy the website on developement environment, then make it again on test. I took about 4 hours before everything was fully working. Make sure you have enough time, because it can be more tricky if you need to stop everything then come back to it.