You might have heard that there is a new version of magento out there. Magento Community Edition 1.4 has just been declared stable by its creators – Varien. If you want to upgrade you must bear in mind that by doing so you will overwrite all the modifications in your core files. Normally this should not be a problem, as there shouldn’t be any core modifications. However, it is not uncommon that magento developers and designers do some quick changes in the core and then forget to move them to the local code pool or local template. The only way to make sure that your site will not loose the extra functionality or some custom styling is to track all the changes that have been applied to your core files and either move them to the local code/design files before upgrading or reapply them after the upgrade (though we would really recommend that you keep your core files free from any modifications). Now to the most important part: How to do this?

In order to find the core changes you would need to download a clean copy of magento. Be sure to download exactly the same version that you are currently running (you can check your current version in the admin panel’s footer). After download you need to extract the ‘app’ folder and place it somewhere in your filesystem. For the purpose of this example, lets assume that you put the original app file in the magento root folder and rename it to app.org.

Now you will need to make use of the linux console. The tool you will use is diff. It is a standard program for comparing files that should be present in all linux distributions. The only parameter that would need to be added is -r which switches the tool to recursive mode. The final command looks as follows for:

diff -r magento_root/app/code/core magento_root/app.org/code/core > ~/core_code_modifications.txt

diff -r magento_root/app/design/frontend/default/default/ magento_root/app.org/design/frontend/default/default/ > ~/core_design_modifications.txt

After executing those two commands you will have two files created in your home directory:

• core_code_modifications.txt, which will list all the modifications in your core code files
• core_design_modifications.txt, which will list all the modifications in your default template

With that knowledge your job of upgrading magento will be much simpler. Again, after you have successfully upgraded your magento store to version 1.4, do take some extra time and move the changes to the local code pool and/or your custom template. This will save you a lot of time and trouble in future upgrades and will also ensure that your store is easier to maintain by your developers and designers.

Tags: Design, Development, Ecommerce, Magento

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Design, Development, Ecommerce, Magento. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.