If advised to do it DON'T

My advice for what it is worth is Do Not upgrade something if it is working properly to something that is unknown to yourself.
I updated some 3 weeks ago from 1.3.9h to 1.5.0 and have had nothing but problems in that time I have not had 1 single customer. The site is a total mess behind the scenes. My SEO which is being run professionally is virtually OES as my visitor intake gets less and less by the day.

Before anyone says I did the upgrade wronly I didn't after a bit of research i had it done professionally

So that is my opinion for what it is worth.

Got a link to your site?

rafwraf:

My advice for what it is worth is Do Not upgrade something if it is working properly

This is pretty poor advice in almost every situation. They are called 'UPgrades' with good reason. Even if the upgrades do introduce new problems they almost always fix more old problems than the new ones introduced.

As for 'if its working properly', this only works if you wish to ignore the fact that someone may have discovered a security flaw in the code and unless an upgrade is performed the 'working properly' code is now 'highly vulnerable to exploit' code.

Of lesser concern is the fact that upgrades generally need to be performed progressively, and unless a person keeps up with the updates they can easily end up several versions behind the current release and you are more likley to have upgrade issues when it is eventually essential to do so.

rafwraf:

I updated some 3 weeks ago from 1.3.9h to 1.5.0 and have had nothing but problems in that time I have not had 1 single customer.

This is not the experience of most users that have upgraded. It may not appear that way by reading these forums but that is only because people only post to the forums when they've got a problem. The bulk of the people that have upgraded without any problem aren't going to post a message detailing their successes, if they did the reported problem posts would be outnumbered by 1000's/1

rafwraf:

The site is a total mess behind the scenes. My SEO which is being run professionally is virtually OES as my visitor intake gets less and less by the day.

SEO's generally cause more problems than those they attempt to solve. ZenCart doesn't need them, and my money says that whatever your problems are they are actually caused by the SEO rather than the zencart upgrade itself, so contrary to your advice of "Do Not upgrade something if it is working properly" I think far better advice is to seriously consider what add-ons you add to the cart and only use those that are needed. Additional SEO is not needed for ZenCart.

rafwraf:

Before anyone says I did the upgrade wronly I didn't after a bit of research i had it done professionally

I'm not going to say you did it wrongly, but that doesn't mean the 'professional' that did it for you didn't make a mistake. These things happen.

rafwraf:

So that is my opinion for what it is worth.

Surely, if you paid a professional to do the upgrade then you should be letting him/her know about your issues so that they can (hopefully) do something about it. That is going to be far more productive than posting an opinion here, doubly so when your opinion is apparently based on work performed by a 3rd party rather than your own experience. Who knows, had you done the upgrade yourself you may not even have these issues.

Cheers
Rod

rafwraf:

Before anyone says I did the upgrade wronly I didn't after a bit of research i had it done professionally

Apparently the professionals who did it messed it up then. Are you taking your concerns to them?

The advice to not upgrade because some upgraders are careless or inept is really bad advice. The newest version of Zen Cart fixes bugs and addresses security issues. Staying up to date is your best defense against getting hacked.

I think what he's basically saying is if it ain't broke don't fix it (even if its your fault you mess it up), and I don't think there are any security gains from 1.39h to 1.5?

dgent:

I don't think there are any security gains from 1.39h to 1.5?
Actually, there are numerous such gains.

DrByte:

Actually, there are numerous such gains.

One that we have good reason to appreciate is the auto-email now received when certain alterations are made to admin settings. We caught out a potential crook earlier this year... A client fired a member of their tech team, but omitted to change various passwords... usual story. But this guy then went and changed the paypal settings. I won't go into the gory details, but the instant he did this, the owner was alerted to the change...

So... some very valuable security changes are evident in 1.5

Yup, and the admin profiles addition can be considered a security upgrade.

Personally, if I had a 1.3.8a cart, I would upgrade it to 1.3.9h, check thoroughly to make sure everything worked right, then upgrade to 1.5.0.

stevesh:

Yup, and the admin profiles addition can be considered a security upgrade.

Personally, if I had a 1.3.8a cart, I would upgrade it to 1.3.9h, check thoroughly to make sure everything worked right, then upgrade to 1.5.0.

Our advice too... go from 1.3.xxxxx (if lower than 1.3.9), firstly to 1.3.9h.

Then BACKUP EVERYTHING and do a full audit of addons and custom work... then perform the 1.5 upgrade .

We would advise for existing zencart site owner. If you really doing eCommerce business, then please first decide your business niche properly so your website can pay of the developers. Do not blame zencart or upgrade advise.

According to our facts, when we created our first version of the zencart store with 1.3.8a, we took it as a framework about 3 years ago. Like a designer take photoshop as design framework. with photoshop you make good design and you use zencart to upgrade your store and make it smarter day by day by using developer in house or outsource. If you have developer they will do the necessary changes as per your requirement and make it work. And you do not need to upgrade to zencart future version as you will have your own upgrades and you will never need zencart team to release an update for you.

From my understanding Zencart team is very generous who releases their very hard worked>>> framework as open source and you can have a fast start with your business with minimum cost. We do really appreciate zencart team who created the opportunity for lot of people to try online eCommerce business at very low cost.

Just take a look at our website https://www.computervalley.ca we spent a lot of time analyzing our requirement and advise our programemrs to make it work. And I believe over 1 million products/sku our website is running pretty smooth and blazing fast browsing speed! And our programmers just advised 2 days ago that there is something new they can do and it will be even faster! I would say OMG! are you sure? lol

schoolboy:

One that we have good reason to appreciate is the auto-email now received when certain alterations are made to admin settings. We caught out a potential crook earlier this year... A client fired a member of their tech team, but omitted to change various passwords... usual story. But this guy then went and changed the paypal settings. I won't go into the gory details, but the instant he did this, the owner was alerted to the change...

So... some very valuable security changes are evident in 1.5

Does this work if they make the changes via SQL?

No it would not. The protection is provided when changes are made through the admin panel.

swguy:

No it would not. The protection is provided when changes are made through the admin panel.

Sorry, I meant to say through SQLpatch

Not at the present time. But of course as a small step you could use the Admin Profile feature to prevent access to that tool for all but authorized users.

In my Opinion.... the only way to try out a NEW version of Zencart is to do the following:

A) BACKUP your original site - including the Database.

B) Install your new zencart on your server for test purposes. So you have your original site running as well as your test site.
Example.... www.original_site.com/ original site
www.original_site/test_site/ test site

If you are NOT happy with your new upgrade then you can always revert back to the working version you had before - hence the backup.
Or, you can still install the new version as a test site. And have that working as well as your original site. Once again, if the new site dosnt perform, then you will always have your original site to fall back on.

I have a few sites up and they are all using Zencart. On one of my sites, i wanted to upgrade from v1.39h to v1.50. I tried the upgrade and I had some problems so it is still running fine using version 1.3.9h until I sort them out.

Hope that helps.......