Upgrade Magento to 1.4(.1.1): Part One
This week at ecommerce web design, I’ve had the dreaded task of upgrading an existing, live Magento site to 1.4.1.1 – and not just any upgrade, it’s from 1.3.2.1. I don’t think I was envied in the office.
After much research, several discussions, and a deep breath, I began the process of backing up literally anything and everything and dived in.
Lesson One: Don’t upgrade using Magento Connect – in short, it didn’t work at all. It said successful, despite there being several errors. The backend loaded alright, but was still the original version but the frontend displayed nothing but a white, blank page.
Lesson Two: A solution that seems to work for many did not work, but that didn’t work in this case was to do as follows:
- Create a copy of your existing database, rename it to something different.
- Create a subdirectory in your domain, for example “dev”
- Go to the core_config_data table in your copied database and update the relevant URLs to your new subdirectory
- Put the Magento files onto the new subdirectory and run the installation – using the details for your copied database
- Sit, Wait, Hope
During this installation there were a few nail biting moments – including a couple of timeouts that led to a few SQL errors, but it actually seemed to go alright. The backend worked like a dream, running 1.4.1.1, retaining all the previous customer data, previous sales, searches, pages and so on. For a minute, I thought my Magento upgrade had worked, and indeed it had (kind of) – the database upgraded just fine!
Alas… all was not well on the front page – still nothing but a blank page. After a bit of debugging, we found that, for some reason, the last line of code was failing, with apparently no fix 4 hours in:
Mage::run($mageRunCode,$mageRunType);
Coming Next on our magento blog: How to get it all working again!
I have this blank page on the frontend too. After debugging, seems it caused by dispatching “noRoute” action in class Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard function match(). But I don’t know why the request action is “noRoute”. Any idea?
How to get it all working again?
@BinLi Hmm, no idea of the top of my head – but the next time an upgrade comes up I’ll have a look into it!
@sungeigedong Part 2 will be up on Saturday 14th – things did not go well!
Thanks for reading