Magento 1.8 has been released

Magento 1.8

I am a huge fan of Magento.  It is a great ecommerce and shopping cart system.   In the last year I have launched a few sites using this system.   The flexibility of Magento allowed me to create a B2B site and also B2C.    eBay purchased Magento and I have heard a few people trying to figure out what their plans are for the System.  It may be a new release in the future? Maybe a 2.0?  In the last few weeks a new version of Magento was released 1.8.      This release promises feature enhancements:

  • Tax enhancements – correcting a few issues
  • Performance enhancements (who can argue with this – Speed is very important and it looks to use less resources)
  • Functional improvement – Quality and settings
  • Security enhancements – Anytime you have an ecommerce site – security is essential

I have only had the chance to update 2 sites from 1.7 to 1.8, and the experience has been different for both.  I started with my development system and site and then did production.  Overall I am happy with the upgrade.

Upgrade Process

The upgrade documentation is a bit confusing.  I found that the process is pretty straight forward but the documentation is lacking.  The Magento site has some process available here.  I found a few other resources and combined the information to make my upgrade.

In the end I had a bit of troubleshooting to do, based on permissions and file ownership.  Basically because I had moved files as Root on my server.

These are summarized steps, I followed a process similar to this post from MagePlace

1. Backup your Database and Files – I chose to use the built in Magento backup process.  I did both a full (with Database and media files) and just a database.   I do this because the DB.gz file is easy to import into a different system.  I also have a daily backup on my serer to make files easy.

2. I then made sure to clear all cache and sessions

rm -rf var/cache/* var/session/*

3.   a) I used magneto connect manager  to upgrade (On my dev system)

b) I usesed these commands to upgrade on dev server and production

cd /your_magento_folder
chmod -R 777 ./*
rm -rf var/cache/* var/session/*
chmod 550 ./mage
./mage mage-setup .
./mage config-set preferred_state stable
./mage list-installed

If you have issues on the very end command “./mage list-installed” you may need to use a more forcefull upgrade.

./mage install http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community Mage_All_Latest –force

./mage list-upgrades
./mage upgrade-all

 

I ended up having to change ownership from root to the login name for the site.

4.   Then correct permissions for the files

php shell/indexer.php reindexall
chmod -R 644 ./*
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
chmod 550 ./mage

I may have missed a few steps because I did this a few different ways.  Good luck upgrading.  Once I got the sites back up I have seen some performance gains (I can’t quantify them).  But the sites do seem faster.

I’ll continue to update as things progress.

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