1.4.1.1 version upgrade

[clubbuilder]

A friend of a friend asked me to update his magento shopping cart. I am a webmaster, but have never used Magento. He is using Magento Community v1.4.1.1. The best I can tell his platform is over 5 years old. Ouch!

He has lots of customers and many products. I am unsure as to whether to advise him to upgrade this in incremental patches (which I assume I can find all the way back to his version) or to build a brand new store. Since his site is over 5 years old I assume there are many major upgrades and his version of PHP and MySQL are old to begin with. So I don't know up upgrading so far back is going to work.

If I were to do a fresh install on a new server is it possible to import all his previous customers, products, and attributes? Or would it be best to upgrade his store as is in increments, then migrate over to a new server? Just wondering the best approach to upgrade such an old site with existing data.

[clubbuilder]

I found this post it helps: http://community.magento.com/t5/Version-Upgrades/How-do-I-conduct-an-upgrade-from-Magento-v1-4-1-1-t...

Still don't know if I should start from scratch or upgrade one at a time. In the end I would assume, it still needs moved over to a new MySQL and PHP version.

[chiefair · Accepted solution]

Because of the database restructuring and adding of tables that occurs, 1.4.1.1 is distinctly different from 1.4.2.0 and basically 1.4.2.0 can be considered to be a version all it's own.

The major issues come from database upgrades. The logical succession is 1.4.1.1 => 1.4.2.0 => 1.5.1.0 => 1.6.2.0 => anything you want. There are major database revisions in each of these upgrades, trying to jump 1.4.2.0 past 1.5.1.0 for me was a disaster. Going from 1.4.1.1 to 1.6.2.0 was totally no-go.

The code stabilizes with 1.6 and in fact if you open up 1.9.2.1 and run down all the internal module versioning, they're all 1.6 except for a couple exceptions. A jump from 1.6.2.0 to 1.9.2.1 is pretty minimal in the time it takes for the database conversion, the major issues will come about if you have a lot of custom templates.

Of course any third party modules will have to be upgraded to the latest version.

Lot of work ahead of you, been there, don't want to experience it again, ever.

Brent Petersen has a lot of experience with this =>

http://www.brentpeterson.net/2014/11/upgrade-using-fresh-install-and.html

https://wiki.magento.com/display/m1wiki/Manual+upgrade+using+a+fresh+install+and+new+database

[clubbuilder]

Thank you for the response and your list of the version detail. Your post is much appreciated!

[chiefair]

You're welcome!

Make sure you do this all on a test server first until you get everything worked out for successful upgrades so you don't kill your live e-commerce server.

[QuangDungst]

If Magento store has many entities and you want to upgrade data from old version to higher version, you should be careful. Upgrade to magento higher version can occur loose existing data. It is not same as update version that is to fix small errors. Magento upgrade version is the big change on structures and data. For example, Magento upgrade from 1.4 to 1.9 is upgrading data from old version with many gaps to the latest verion of Magento 1.x. Consider this way and what do you think:

- Backed up my DB & restored to a new DB.
- A new set of 1.9.2.4 files against that DB & run the install process
- Put my theme files in the 1.9 structure
- Put any extensions compatable with 1.9 there
- Fix any custom extensions