The Truth About Sitecore Upgrades

This blog post gives some insight from what I’ve learnt about the Sitecore Upgrade process, and my beliefs about how you should approach an upgrade. Many people have their own opinions on upgrades, and many have voiced them, either through user groups, blog posts, or forum replies.
While I agree with some, and disagree with others, we’re all still learning…. so nothing should be taken as gospel from anyone…
The posts (including this one) are opinions, mainly based off the author’s own experiences… and so, if there are things here that I’ve missed in this post, or something you disagree with, please let me know in the comments.

At one stage or another, every client will want to upgrade their Sitecore instance.
This may be for bug fixes, or for some of the new features that come with the latest versions of Sitecore. And with the plethora of new marketing features in Sitecore 8, the push to be up-to-date has never been greater.

At Hedgehog Development, we’ve worked on numerous Sitecore upgrades over the years.
Every one of them we’ve learned something new. No two upgrades have been the same, and some have been far more complicated than others. We’ve even written custom applications that allow an upgrade to take place over a couple of weeks, to allow for full testing and a slow, controlled roll-out of new features.
With this experience, we’ve learnt the steps involved in the upgrade, and the importance of all the intricate processes that occur during the upgrade.
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A fix for the Sitecore 7.1 Upgrade Process

This is a fix for the Sitecore 7.1 upgrade process, where Rules fields may not have their Source (Rules Context) updated correctly during the upgrade. The fix was originally posted on my Github repo and should be used when upgrading from Sitecore 7.0 to Sitecore 7.1.
It has been assessed and approved by Sitecore Support.

How to Fix the normal process

Follow the initial steps (Steps 1 to 9) in the Sitecore update installation instructions here.
Before installing the Sitecore 7.1 update package in the Update Installation Wizard (Step 10,11):-

• copy the Hedgehog.SC71Upgrade.DLL file from the __install files directory into your Website’s /bin directory.
• make a change to the App_Config/FieldTypes.config file with the following change.
  • change
    <fieldType name="Rules" type="Sitecore.Data.Fields.TextField,Sitecore.Kernel" resizable="true" />
    to
    <fieldType name="Rules" type="Hedgehog.SC71Upgrade.Data.Fields.RulesField,Hedgehog.SC71Upgrade" resizable="true" />
  • Note: This change can be seen in the example file located here __install files/FieldTypes.config.
• Now install the normal update package (Step 10,11 in the Sitecore update installation instructions) and complete the remaining steps for the upgrade.

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Sitecore Upgrade Post Step Scripts

Charlie Turano recently told me a lesser known fact about Sitecore’s upgrade process. There is a block of code that gets executed to update existing items in the database. This is what’s known as an installation ‘Post Step’, and it gets triggered after the new or changed items are added to the database.

For example, Sitecore 6.5 updated the ‘Placeholder Settings’ items to have a new ‘Placeholder Key’ field.
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