Upgrading from V3 & V4 stores to V5 or V6

[Debyink]

I've used cubecart for many many years - still have a V3 store and a couple of V4 stores both heavily modded.

I have tried a test install of V6 but the skins I downloaded from the marketplace don't work right (mainly the slider) on Kurouto and Mican. see http://www.craftracks.co.uk/shop/  this didn't bode well for me.

I don't know whether to go the V5 or V6 route but I have 2 V4 websites associated with my main business, one is for general customers and the other is for my trade customers, this has mods where prices are hidden until logged in but you need customer approval before being able to log in.

V4 stores  http://www.inkylicious.co.uk and  http://www.inkylicious.co.uk/trade

I don't want regular customers seeing what the trade buy our stock for.

I need to really update my sites now and get them in-line with our new website which is being written, so we can have a nice flow through where all the headers etc match and the stores will be in subs of our main domain.

I was so used to how V4 worked and changing the files etc and have had a peep at the V5 files but find them overwhelming. Google is going to start penalising me for having a non responsive website so upgrading is now a must.

[bsmither]

We are aware that there is some modification to CC5 skins to make them fully functional with CC6.

As you have found, CC6's Homepage document (that's where the 'slider' content is) assumes the slider controller is available. It's not. So, it's up to you if you want to keep the slider content in the Homepage document.

There is also an issue with pagination for the CC5 skins running on CC6.

When using a CubeCart-published CC5 skin on either CC5 or CC6, be sure to also get the Mobile skin. The auto switch-over for mobile devices will probably satisfy Google.

CC6 is the same as CC5, but with more features, and includes no languages, modules, or skins other than Foundation.

The programming paradigm as compared to CC3/4 is very different. I would say it's like learning to drive a stick-shift after years of driving an automatic transmission vehicle, but that's actually a lousy analogy. If you choose to, wrapping your head around the CC5/6 programming style will take a few months, but it will all snap into place. And you will see that it's actually laid out intuitively -- mostly.

Admin approval for customer accounts is an interesting feature. I have already put in place for CC5 an edit that will allow an admin to "lock-down" a customer. That is, a customer's profile that, once created, can't have any aspect of it changed by the customer. It shouldn't be too hard to make a "pending approval" status on customer accounts. (In fact, I think I did that already for an early version of CC5. I'll have to check.)