Questions about upgrading

[vfrazier]

I've got the Hoek book, and set up my site 2 years ago, or more, with great difficulty and much confusion, and much help from this forum. After that, my hosting service (as far as I know) had an easy upgrade option from their cpanel which seemed to work fine. That's how all previous upgrades happened.

Now it appears to be time to consider upgrading to 1.3.9G & H and the hosting service easy upgrade is no longer available. Bummer.

I am computer disabled when it comes to understanding the upgrade process. I've read though the "how to..." stuff, made a back up copy on my PC, printed all the admin pages from the stores' back end for future reference, merged some files (I think), and loaded those files back to a (public_html/store_new) folder on my hosting site.

As far as i know, I have no add-ons. Those are separate little programs that you add as needed, right?

The next step appears to be to make a new database. Where is the old one? What does it look like? Why didn't it copy itself when I copied the other files?




Later I see that I need to run zcinstall. Does that need to reside in the (public_html/store_new) folder ?

It seems like there should be a zcupgrade folder somewhere too!

[DrByte]

If you have v1.3.9f now, then all you need to do is this:

a) download v1.3.9h (link on www.zen-cart.com home page)
b) look in the /docs/ folder, and open the "changelog 1.3.9g.html" and "changelog 1.3.9h.html" files, and print them.
c) both of those printed files show you the list of files that were changed in those versions. Start with the "139g" list. Check whether you've customized any of them, either with your own customizations or by addons. If you've customized any of them, redo those customizations in the new 1.3.9h version of those files. Then copy the newly customized new file to your site. If you've *not* customized them, just copy the new version to your site. Then repeat with the "139h" list. If any are duplicates of what was on the 139g list and you've already uploaded those updated files, you don't need to upload them again.

No need for doing anything fancy with database or zcinstall when going from 139f to 139g to 139h. It's a simple upgrade.

[vfrazier]

Cool, that sounds much more logical and much easier.

One more dumb question, when I upgrade the /admin/ files, do I need to change the ones in the /admin/ folder or is it OK to simply change the ones in the /admin_renamed/ folder?

[DrByte]

If you've renamed your /admin/ to something else, then use that "something else" foldername for updating all the admin-related files instead of literally "/admin/"

[vfrazier]

I can't help but notice that while merging the files using Winmerge, there are many files that aren't listed in the changelogs that show up as being different. What should be done with those files? Ignore them? Change them?

[vfrazier]

FWIW, the actual upgrade, following Dr. Bytes instructions, took me about 3 hours. The previous time spent, several weeks of spare time, was mostly spent worrying that I'd screw the whole store up. Happily, that didn't seem to happen.

I'd still be very interested in an answer to my previous post regarding the files that are different than those listed in the changelogs. By "different" I mean that they were old files that weren't listed in the changelogs as needing to be updated.

I had quite a few of these older files that flagged as being different in the WinMerge program. I ignored them and the store seems to work fine.

I also have several files that WinMerge would change, but they also listed as still being different even after the changes were made. Is that some WinMerge quirk, or something to do with file permissions, etc. ? They definitely changed and were saved properly, but they still appear to be different.

Thanks again for everyone's help. Many of us (most of us?) could not possibly do this without this forum.

[DrByte]

I can't help but notice that while merging the files using Winmerge, there are many files that aren't listed in the changelogs that show up as being different. What should be done with those files? Ignore them? Change them?

That depends on why it says they're different. If you double-click on the match, it'll show you what's different in the files. If it's just the copyright date or version date in the top of the file, you should be fine. I'd still update them anyway myself, since if you don't then they'll just show up again next time needlessly, but if that's really the only difference in the file, then you could ignore it too.

If your FTP program has changed the line-endings of every line in your file, then WinMerge will show each line as being different ... in which case the comparison of those particular files is much more difficult. But, again, if after reviewing all the differences you discover that it was only line-endings that were different, then you have two options: skip the file (and face the same issue again next time you upgrade), or replace the file anyway and hopefully thus repair the file's lineendings in case they're bad on the server copy.