Upgrading from 2.3 to 2.8+ Best approach?

Hello,

I have an existing 2.30 site that I want to upgrade to a newer version. If it was easy enough I may go to the most recent version (3.0), but version 2.8 would be the mimimum I would be upgrading to.

My question is ... Would it make more sense to go through each incremental upgrade from 2.3, 2.4...etc to 2.8, or would it better to start with the 2.8, then reapply the design and somehow transfer the data (orders, products, settings, etc) from the old site to the new one?  While we have been involved in customizing nopcommerce in the past (code and design), we have not performed an upgrade yet.

The old 2.3 site has changes made to a couple plugins (one for a payment gateway, one for canada post), and some minor adjustments to the nop framework. The design is a fairly basic modification of the original 2.3 template. We have noted the changes we made to the framework coding so they can be redone easily enough.

Either way I know we will have to redo the changes to the nop core, and also possibly adjust the plugins if they don't work with the new version. I'm just trying to figure out what's the better route to take because of the difference in version numbers.

Please, anyone with real world, hands on experience with ugprading v2.x nop, I would appreciate your thoughts.

nopcanuck

nopCanuck wrote:

Do both locally and see which works the best.

If you go for upgrade make sure you run the upgrade scripts once, otherwise you end up duplicate data.


Once you upgrade to 2.8 you can take the opportunity to tweak/consolidate/improve your stylesheet and as long as your upgrade has gone smoothly you will end up with a current version of nop with an updated style sheet.

We have done this for few sites.. and the best approach is to first upgrade your db in incremental way and then test and fix your theme and other customization including plugin directly on the final newer version.

Let me know if you have any other question.