STEFCO: rewriting 17 plugins and cleaning the core code

Intro:

STEFCO has been on the market of theater and stage equipment, equipment for entertainment and sporting events for over five years. Among its products, there are offerings from the best manufacturers: Harlequin, Tuchler, Gerriets, Milos, ShowLED, Chain Master and others. The company also delivers and installs the equipment.

The company was growing rapidly and was seeking to increase its profits and expand sales. In this regard, the decision was made to upgrade the company's website to the latest 4.10 nopCommerce version supporting .NET Core with further plans to migrate the website to Linux hosting.

Challenge:

STEFCO requested the site upgrade because of the following requirements:

• More user-friendly admin area with better responsive design
• Future plans to migrate to Linux hosting (4.10 version supports .NET Core)
• Improved in-store pickup support
• Performance optimization

However, two main challenges were discovered during the upgrade:

• nopCommerce source code and database of the 3.70 website was heavily modified preventing to perform the upgrade using the normal process
• Custom plugins required additional modifications to be compatible with the new version of nopCommerce

Solution:

ISDK team audited the previous site version to identify nopCommerce source code changes. The installed third-party plugins were checked as well. The problem areas were spotted, a decision was made to perform the following activities:

• Implement custom SQL scripts to make a copy of the database without custom modifications
• Move all customizations from nopCommerce source code to custom plugins
• Review and update existing custom plugins to support the new version of nopCommerce
• Perform regular upgrade process from updated 3.70 setup to 4.10 using upgrade scripts
• Change custom theme and plugins configuration settings after upgrade to reflect changes in nopCommerce platform and to use new features available in new versions of theme and plugins

Result:

Despite the initial challenges, the upgrade process from 3.70 to 4.10 went pretty smoothly. During the upgrade, all data and settings were persisted and traffic loss was minimal. All key client’s requirements were fully met including readiness for future migration to Linux hosting. This case highlights well-known issues of customizing nopCommerce source code and database that cause difficulties with regular upgrade process and require extra work before starting upgrade activities. It also proves best practices of using built-in nopCommerce plugin system for such customizations.

ISDK has been on the Microsoft solutions market for 8 years. The company delivers retailers and service providers with nopCommerce-based omnichannel solutions embracing the convenience of shopping from computer and mobile-apps, NLP-chatbots and self-service kiosks.