Easy MageBridge upgrades?
Saturday, 18 September 2010Both MageBridge as Magento are shipped with web-based update managers. But perhaps this makes it too easy to upgrade things, because still - a major change should be well planned and you should always have a backup.
MageBridge upgrades
Within the MageBridge settings in both the Joomla! Administrator as well as the Magento Admin Panel, performing an upgrade only requires a simple click. But what many people take too lightly is the fact that a new version introduces not only new features but potentially also new bugs.
While we test things thoroughly before actually releasing a new upgrade, the software that MageBridge offers is already so complex and so flexible that it really depends on your specific configuration and the third party extensions you're using.
We always recommend people to create a solid backup before upgrading MageBridge. Also, if you have a backup ready, you should be fully instructed on how to actually restore from that backup - in case of emergency. Ideally you would first upgrade things in a testing environment, before putting it into production.
Magento upgrades
With Magento itself, upgrading should also not be picked up lightly: First of all, you should check which extensions are used within the Magento e-commerce system and check whether these extensions work together with the available upgrade. Second, you should have realized by now that Magento is much more complex than other open-source PHP-applications like Joomla!, and there for you should have a full testing environment up and running.
The actual upgrade is also simple thanks to the Magento Admin Panel. But when upgrading there is a wide range of problems that can occur: When the Magento upgrade is performed, while the Magento Compiler is enabled, the compiler cache still needs to be refreshed - but doing this in a wrong order may cause white pages. Of course, making any change in Magento, requires the refresh of all the Magento caches.
Conclusion
Yes, the software makes it easy to upgrade. But this was not ment to perform a 5-minute upgrade - it was ment to save you time. All this extra time should now be used for thorough testing. That's the gain.