4.3.0. To upgrade or not to upgrade?

[Guest onlyespadrilles]

As with all new major releases, there are always going to be bugs that squeeze through the untold rounds of usability testing.

Anyone agree that it's better to hold back from upgrading straight away and then upgrade once the small fixes have been made?

[Ausy]

Personally I don't agree, the upgrade to version 4.3 fixed many bugs from 4.2.3 so I think its much better to have the latest release, there are bound to be some more bugs arrise but they are normally fixed very quickly. Also version 4.3 has a major update of the FCK editor and it has fixed lots of problems with the old version's compatability with the latest browsers.

[Guest cwalter]

It was a complete nightmare for me, i like everyone else have a few mods installed so i had to manually upgrade, it took hours and after all that my site was dead and did not work.

i just reinstalled my back up of cc4.2.3 and am staying with this version for a while longer.. I dont have time to play around with code errors and pages that dont work. My site is 24 hours and needs to run smoothly 24/7.. I'm happy with cc4.2.3. for me its the best version yet.

One word of advice make sure you do a back up before doing upgrade...

And one more thing, 50% of the time spent on this manual upgrade was due to changing that one line of code in the head section of so many pages. Something to do with the wording in the licence url. What a pain that was editing each page one by one especially since it did nothing to alter the actual coding. Or am i wrong is that software licence line of code very important? Anyway either way spending an hour and half just changing that line of code was painful....

so the answer to the question To Upgrade or Not? I say Not.

cwalter

[merlin57]

I have just upgraded to 4.30 and though the site still works I cannot get into admin.

Fatal error: Unable to read 12782 bytes in /home/sites/machine-tools.org.uk/public_html/store/admin_enc_zend.php on line 0

Any suggestions other than go back to 4.23

[Ausy]

Try and upload again the following file in binary mode

index_enc_zend.php

admin_enc_zend.php

[merlin57]

Try and upload again the following file in binary mode

index_enc_zend.php

admin_enc_zend.php

Thanks for that I had forgot and my ftp package sends php as text.

I now have the following error;

MySQL Error Occurred

Error Message:

1054: Unknown column 'salt' in 'field list'

SQL:

SELECT `adminId`, `salt` FROM CubeCart_admin_users WHERE `username`='merlin57

My problem Again - should have RTFM!!

Should anyone else be as daft as me I had not run the upgrade script in the setup directory!!

All upgraded now and no problems.

[kinetic]

Funny I had NO problem upgrading one of my clients from v3.0.12 to 4.3

not manually

but using the upgrade instructions

we did have to re install v4 versions of any of the many mods he had on his store but thats to be expected

no errors no problems and didnt lose a single byte of data

upgrading is neccessary

doing it right and with Proper BACKUPs is mandatory

following it step by step and NOT being in a hurry are highly recommended....

Getting someone who KNOWs what they are doing to do it for you ABSOLUTELY the best option

[Guest cwalter]

Yes kinetic thats my point, of course its easy to upgrade using the auto method with instructions, you dont even need to know what your doing for that.

But if you have a heavily altered store packed with mods, using the easy upgrade is simply not an option for me. So as i said before doing it manually is time consuming and care must be taken. Especially on this upgrade and believe me i have done a few upgrades in my time so i know what i am talking about.

Anyway each to his own as we all have different sites with different mods installed. Its my own fault for having so many mods i guess.

I still love cc4.2.3 its the best one yet in my books....

cwalter

[Guest M i k e]

I usually wait a week or two, and then run the update. I will say it has always gone well. (knock on wood). Just be sure and take your time and read everything carefully, don't be in a hurry.

I always make 2 backups, just to be safe.

[Guest Brivtech]

Error Message:

1054: Unknown column 'salt' in 'field list'

SQL:

SELECT `adminId`, `salt` FROM CubeCart_admin_users WHERE `username`='merlin57

Have you run the update script? This should update the database tables with this new field.

[Guest dingocc]

I have worked in IT for many years and have learnt from hard experience that in-place upgrades of systems and softwares is to be avoided if possible. My approach is to document in detail all changes performed, which can then be applied again some time later. I will do the following:

1. Evaluate the worth of upgrading and proceed only if 4.3.0 offers significant benefit; it may not! Ask yourself if the upgrade effort provides enough return? Will the upgrade drive more sales?
   
2. If proceeding: Install a fresh 4.3.0 instance
   
3. Validate as fully functional and remediate all issues
   
4. Load data
   
5. Step through my detailed change log from 4.2.3 and reapply third-party mods and my customisation. Backup before each change and test functionality after each change
   

The time invested remains significant however the process is methodical and importantly permits rolling back should issues arise.

[Guest k6kdk]

I have worked in IT for many years and have learnt from hard experience that in-place upgrades of systems and softwares is to be avoided if possible. My approach is to document in detail all changes performed, which can then be applied again some time later. I will do the following:

1. Evaluate the worth of upgrading and proceed only if 4.3.0 offers significant benefit; it may not! Ask yourself if the upgrade effort provides enough return? Will the upgrade drive more sales?
   
2. If proceeding: Install a fresh 4.3.0 instance
   
3. Validate as fully functional and remediate all issues
   
4. Load data
   
5. Step through my detailed change log from 4.2.3 and reapply third-party mods and my customisation. Backup before each change and test functionality after each change
   

The time invested remains significant however the process is methodical and importantly permits rolling back should issues arise.

Dear dingocc,

You are exactly right with what you say above ! Everyone would be wise to follow your excellent advice.

There is one more very bullet proof method of approach. This only works if you are running a ecommerce store that is profitable and valuable and worth every hour of its up/run time. If you are running a "hobby store" then following method is not for you. But if you are a professional and there is real money involved you might consider this--> Since server space is so cheap nowadays, and a license on server copy of cube cart is only $175 we employ the following. I have two sites, basically one is a mirror of the other. All upgrades are done on the mirror site. When the upgrade / patches/ MODS are applied they are tested and when known good, then you can either copy all files to the main site, or use a DNS redirect to take customer to the mirror. Then the mirror site becomes the main site, until the next upgrade cycle when the process is reversed.

One of the main benifits of this method is that the customer never sees the site off line for even a moment. You just "flip the switch" when you are ready and the upgrade is "instant" as far as the customer is concerned.

If you are concerned about SEO or Google, most search engines accept DNS redirect as valid and are not concerned. You should not loose any position in your SEO ratings. If you are really worried about this them just use the mirror as a "test bed" and copy files to the main when you are ready.

Another benifit of mirror sites is, of course, if run at two different data centers, you will still be up and running in the event of a nuclear attack on one of them -LOL !!!

[Guest perlinajewellery]

I don't think I am alone here when I say there should be 2 separate downloads available when an update/upgrade has been made.

Full 4.3.0 Version

This being for the people who can easily update/upgrade their store as they have not edited or modded the core files in any way. They can just update/upgrade their store as per usual with out any worry.

Updated files for 4.3.0 ONLY

It would be EXTREMELY useful for those of us who have mods and tweaks with the core files. At the moment when there is an update/upgrade you only have the option of downloading the entire script again so mods and tweaks would get over-written and would have to be re-inserted. There is also the point that uploading the entire script again is unnecessary and a bandwidth costing exercise. Receiving just the updated files would really save us time and bandwidth!

[Ausy]

To be fair when an upgrade is announced we are normally given a detailed file comparison report with the full code that has been changed. For those of us with heavily modded stores we can see the changed code straight away. Even if a set of changed only files were released we would still have to alter and check them one by one, we couldn't just upload them so I can't see the benefit of having such a package as long as we have the changed files report.

[Guest rukiman]

I think past versions of Cubecart 4 should be available for download just like Cubecart 3. This means heavily modded stores can download the version they initially installed and run it through beyond compare or winmerge. Using these tools you can create a subset of files that are different from your cart and the version you installed. Then all you would have to do then is download the latest version of cubecart and do a merge with that small subset of files which should be very quick. Once those file are merge just overwrite the latest cube cart files with the merged subset files and upload the entire thing to your ftp server. Simple!

But now if you do not have the original cubecart version lying around, you are in for a really long and unnecessarily complicated merge that can be error prone due to the large amount of merging and diff-ing involved. This is also complicated by the copyright headers changing which affect every file.

Comparison html reports between cubecart version are also useless unless you merge every single version released. I prefer to merge every 1/2 year or so. For this it is essential to have access to the old versions of CC4. For an error free merge it is essential to identify every file different (and new files too) from the original cube cart package and merge those with the new version of cubecart.