upgrading from 1.2.4 to current version via fantastico

[Marty McFly]

i installed my cart via fantastico in cpanel....what can i expect will happen after upgrading? i have a cart with a custom template and only one real major hack on it. so what all will i lose and is there any way to avoid this? i dont even rememeber who did the hack for me, it was so long ago.

[DrByte]

I'm gonna recommend that you do a fresh install and rebuild your template and hack into it.

Don't trust fantastico to upgrade you smoothly. I haven't seen one smooth one yet using Fantastico.

If as you said, things weren't changed much, then rebuilding those changes onto the new version will be simpler than trying to debug problems that happened during the upgrade through so many versions.

[Marty McFly]

fresh install?? will i have to re-enter all my products though?!?

[kuroi]

No. FIRST BACKUP YOUR DATABASE. Then do a fresh install of Zen Cart. After that run the zc_install routine to upgrade your database, making sure that you never press a button that says install. Finally you should be ready for the little job of re-building your template on the shiney new XHTML/CSS platform.

[milkyway]

My client have v1.2.4, now I'm about to upgrade to v1.3.0.2, never upgrade from v1.2x though, so I need to take any precaution before doing upgrade.

I'm about to made a testing folder seperate from current live store, so I will install fresh v.1.3.0.2 there on new databases for testing, after that what would be the best way?

- drop all tables from new databases, insert the old tables, upgrade databases through {zc_install}, then delete all the old 1.2.4 files from the old store, paste the new 1.3.0.2 files there, change configure.php pointing to new databases, then work on modifying the template

or

- upload 1.3.0.2 {zc_install} in current live store, upgrade the databases, change the files to v1.3.0.2, change templates

or is there any better way and less time consuming (because the store is quite active)


Last question, what is the best way to export the large database file? should I choose export compatibility SQL40 because hosting server use MySQL 4.1.2 and what is the best way to import sql (around 6MB pure/ if zipped about 700KB)

Thanks!