NopCommerce versions support time

Hi all,

I am trying to find more information about how long each major version of NopCommerce is supported, but I struggle to find that info, can you please help me with that?

Thank you all!

What do you mean by supported ?
You can see the dates of releases here https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce/releases
RE .the Net Platform - Microsoft has a support policy https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy
Plugin developers will generally keep a few major versions live and supported
I have a website running nopCommerce v1.7 which I still support :)

"Technical support" is available here in the forums for any version.
"Maintenance" - In general, my understanding is:  The new release schedule is one major version per year.  Minor versions are released during the year to fix bugs.  When a new major version comes out, the team will probably not release minor versions for past releases.   The code is open source in GitHub, so you / your developer can apply new changes to prior releases.

Thank you all for the replies!
My question is regarding the support of .NET versions and how one can upgrade from one major version to another because I was not able to find much about the topic.
I apologize for not clarifying that at the very beginning.

Here is what I don't understand in the context of .NET support:
- If my NopCommerce application now supports .net 7 and I want to update it to .net 8 when it comes out, can I do that without upgrading the NopCommerce version?

In terms of the update of NopCommerce versions:
- If I want to upgrade a version of NopCommerce, does that mean that I will have to download the skeleton of the new version and manually move everything? The documentation is not saying much when it comes to that.
If this is the case, then any customization of the core functionality would mean tons of time moving it from one place to the other, which is a big complication.

Thank you again!

yoanna.kostova wrote:
Possibly not - each version of nopCommerce is designed and tested and released for a specific .Net Version. Not only the nopCommerce core but all the Packages and other interfaces and Plugins which are utilised woudl need to be upgraded which potentially would be a big job and may introduce a lot of errors.

yoanna.kostova wrote:
Yes if you make customisations to the core then they need to be manually ported over to each new version of nopCommerce. This is one of the reasons why it is better to make customisations via plugins. This way all the changes made are packaged up together and then you just need to upgrade the plugin to the new version.
Of course you can still do it without plugins you just need to keep track of all the changes using documentation and various tools like GitHub and DiffMerge.

Thank you very much for the detailed answers Andrew!

I have a couple more questions:
- You mentioned that you are using a very old version of NopCommerce and you are still maintaining it, isn't this a security risk as Microsoft stops the support of old versions?

- If every single change in the core functionality will have to be moved manually doesn`t that deprive the dev team to use what they have out of the box?

- Regarding the database - if I want to migrate to a newer version of NopCommerce, how can I link my existing database with extended properties, tables, and data? I tried adding an existing database when setting up Nop but I get an error

Thank you again, this discussion has been very useful for me!

Kind regards,
Yoanna

yoanna.kostova wrote:
This version targets ASP.Net 4.7.2 which does not yet have an end date for support which is good.
From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/microsoft-net-framework
Also "Starting with Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio no longer includes .NET Framework components for .NET Framework 4.0 - 4.5.1 because these versions are no longer supported"

Maybe I am wrong, but I think that even though Microsoft say a particular .net version is no longer supported, it would still be the case that if something really bad was discovered in that version and the package it is available to be download from a Microsoft site, then I am guessing that issue would be fixed in a new release regardless of whether they say it is supported or not.

In addition nopCommerce is always at the forefront of developments and potential security issues are identified and protections have been built in the designs even way back then at the start.
That's not to say the website does not try to get hacked everyday and so your server configurations and system protections also part in protecting a website operation.

yoanna.kostova wrote:
What I did not say is that you can have your own library of routines built and rebuilt as .dlls which can be referenced to the Core or to a Plugin. Then it is only the interface to the routines in the libraries that would need to be moved into update versions.

Same with Razor view files. You can have your own Theme and all the files from the Core you have modified can reside in your theme.  The way the system works is to have a search path for View Files.
So first it will search the current Theme for the View file. If it cannot find the file requested in the Theme then it will default to use the Core view files. In addition using a Plugin you can create a Custom View Engine and direct it the search the view files in your Plugin.

yoanna.kostova wrote:
Yes the Database version also needs to match with the current version of nopCommerce. So if you have customisations in the database / missing / different fields there will be errors. So the database also needs to be updated through versions.
This is where Plugins are also useful. You can have all the changes in the database over time managed by a plugin using Data migrations. So when you run an install for the plugin it will make all the changes to the new database as required, or it can upgrade the custom tables you have added in previous versions of the database.

Thank you Andrew!

This cleared out a lot of the gaps I needed to fill.

The community is lucky to have you!

My changes, at this point, since I don't really know how to change the core code, are in the user "Views", the admin "Views", and the "Theme" ("DefaultClean"). The pages don't really layout like I think they should for me and my uses, so I change them to fit my needs.

Since I started out with 4.60.0, I am hoping I can use the programs Yidna suggested and compare the changes and go from there when the next major release comes out.