Procedure for Upgrading between versions of v.7

[PA.com]

Dear all,

Having been using v. 7.0.2 for a couple of years now I am considering upgrading to v. 7.0.7, mainly to sort out the issues with Protocol 2.22 and to attempt to get PayPal to start authorising digital download links properly.

However, I don't want to jeopardise my site and its templates in any way so I am looking to find out exactly what happens upon upgrading between versions - especially whether or not certain templates, PSP and .pl files get changed and whether the upgrade requires the whole site to be refreshed.

Now I have replaced quite a few templates (i.e. Act_Primary) with new ones as I've experimented with subsequent changes (hence I am now on Act_Primary_Paul5). I've also made changes to the PSP templates/scripts and various other things (I use Protx and PayPal).

What I need to know is what fundamental changes are made to any files within my Actinic directories when I upgrade between these version. I haven't been able to find any definite answers when searching through these forums or the knowledgebase, so to have some sort of guide would be very reassuring.

I should mention also that I don't really want to have to do a purge and refresh if I can help it, as my site in nearly 4Gb in size and took about 3 days to upload the first time! Is there a way around this?

Thanks,
Paul

[TraceyHand]

THIS might help a little but I'm sure someone else will have further info too

[PA.com]

Hi,

Yes, that's very useful to read (especially the DD links bits in v7.0.7!), but I guess really what I am looking to discover is which files are altered in order to implement all those lovely changes!!

I understand it is very difficult to retrospectively return to version 7.02 if things go wrong, so I am looking to find out what might go wrong and then decide if its something I'll be able to cope with. I'm very much a learning-it-all-as-I-go-along web programmer, so if it all seems a bit confusing and fraught with hazards I might just leave the updating for an even rainier day.

Ta,
Paul

[leehack]

I understand it is very difficult to retrospectively return to version 7.02 if things go wrong, so I am looking to find out what might go wrong and then decide if its something I'll be able to cope with. I'm very much a learning-it-all-as-I-go-along web programmer, so if it all seems a bit confusing and fraught with hazards I might just leave the updating for an even rainier day.

Upgrade the site on a different machine, before committing the main machine to the upgrade. You can see all that happens then without the need to affect the up and running store. Once happy and you have detailed everything you had to change, then upgrade the working store.

Please tell me 3 day upload was extracting the urine, if not WTH are you doing?

[PA.com]

Cheers Lee,

That all makes good sense. Sadly I don't have a spare machine of my own to try that out on, but perhaps if I ask nicely I may be able to use my dad's machine for this function! Although I suspect he's run out of disk capacity...

The 3 day upload isn't entirely in the realms of fantasy - the first time I uploaded about 3 Gb it took about 40 hours of continuous upload time (including several timeouts it has to be mentioned). The next Gb took the best part of a day as well - these were the days when I only had 1 Mb broadband however, and due to the asymmetric natural of the line uploading takes a lot longer than downloading!

If anyone does have any further advice on what changes are known to take place when upgrading, don't be shy!

[Duncan Rounding]

Consider this...

If you don't have a different machine - which is certainly the best route - then, take asnapshot, backup all of the site1 folder, make sure you have a full download copy of v702.

Then go for it - give it a try - upload it into test. You will more than likely have to upload the whole store again though. You can try to minimise this by hiding a lot of products sections until you are happy with that everything's ok.

[PA.com]

Thanks,

Given all that's been kindly contributed, I think my best and safest route is to get myself a Notebook and use that as the design/maintenance machine with as fast an upload speed as possible to compensate for the store refresh. I'll just have to hope Santa understands what I mean by a Centrino Duo processor!

In the meantime however, I was wondering if there might be a workaround that would help me maintain a more functional site.
Essentially, I have two main reasons for upgrading - the 2.22 protocol, which I think can be worked around from what I read in another thread. My main bugbear however is that fact that virtually none of my PayPal orders are returning digital download links, to the extent that I've had to warn people to only use Protx for MP3 files. If this has been fixed in version 7.0.7 I can only assume it is due to extra cunning lines being added to the PayPal files within the CommonOCC folder - am I right?

Therefore I was wondering if anyone who uses v7.0.7 would be kind enough to email me through copies of both the Act_OCCPayPalTemplate.html and OCCPayPalTemplate.pl files, then perhaps I could examine them against my current files and try to implement any changes I discover between the two.

Any such help gratefully received.

Paul