Archive for February, 2010

Upgrading Magento to version 1.4 – keeping it simple

Posted by: Karen Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

I’ve had a few discussions with people now about how to upgrade to Magento 1.4 in the best fashion. Here is my approach, which works well, and I believe provides the cleanest solution.

  1. Backup everything!
  2. Create a sub-directory called /new on your server
  3. Copy 1.4 release to /new
  4. Take a copy of the existing 1.3.* Magento database, rename it and upload to MySql
  5. Change urls in core_config_data to point to /new
  6. Run magento installation process on /new, referring to the copied Magento database created in step 4 above
  7. Copy media data from base Magento directory into /new

After the installation has completed attempt to login to the magento installation at /new – what you should find is that you still retain all your catalog/customer/settings from 1.3. If you look in the database you will see that this has been updated to a 1.4 database. As far as I can see there are no downsides to following this approach, Magento copes well with upgrading the database.

From here you need to re-install your extensions and create/install your theme. Because the 1.4 release is so signficant I think you will find that you will need to get a new theme, and possibly new extensions. I certainly wouldnt recommend installing a 1.3 theme on 1.4 – it’s not going to work.

A WordPress Blog under Magento

Posted by: Karen Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

On the webshopapps.com site I wanted to run a wordpress blog in the /blog directory.  I didn’t want to integrate the blog into Magento, preferring to keep the 2 applications separate, so this ruled out the blog extension on Magento Connect.

My approach was fairly simple. Here is how I achieved it:

  1. I created a directory webshopapps.com/blog and installed wordpress here
  2. In the root .htaccess file I added an excemption to the URI rewrite rules – RewriteRule ^blog/ – [S=6]
  3. I added in a new .htaccess file under the /blog directory (the contents of which was obtained from Settings->Permalinks in WordPress admin panel)

See here for more information on URI rewrites.