When WannaHavaCookie.com wanted to upgrade their store from Magento version 1.3 to version 1.6 we of course lept at the chance to assist, on condition that it first be tested on a secondary server. The “stage” site took less than a day to correctly establish but was well worth the caution.


The upgrade itself is largely automated and only takes a few minutes. Since Magento’s base theme was radically overhauled around version 1.4 it took the site from this…

Magento Upgrade Troubleshooting

 

…to this!

Magento Upgrade troubleshooting

 

And that is why we always insist on a dry run and a contingency budget for fixes. To accept anything less would be a false economy, your business could suffer the consequences!


In this instance the fix was relatively simple. Some CSS rules needed to adjust their class name. e.g. from “side-col” to “sidebar” or “discounts-box” to “discount”. A few template files are cosmetically changed, but old copies are available from the download archives. Category pages would crash instantly because the pager is completely different, a whole template file was replaced with this short snippet:

<?php echo $this->getPagerHtml() ?>

Overall, it only takes a little diligence to track down all the problems. Just be sure to keep any original documents for reference, and keep the live site open for comparison – Aren’t you glad you didn’t upgrade the live site first?