Friday, July 25, 2008

Migrate from 5.3 to 6.0 (alpha)

Today was my first experience with "alpha" version of Sitecore migration from 5.3 to 6.0.
What I can say, that was not so bad :-). Anyways, I have to say that my site was pretty simple and did not have heavy customization (no custom fields, default devices, no proxies).
I migrated only master database because I had only default security objects in my solution.
I followed all steps from documentation and did not face any problems. Altogether it took about 3 hours to migrate my content and clean up my solution from migration tool. Not bad! Again that was the first time when I saw this tool.
In addition I spent about 2+ hours to adjust my code to spin it in Sitecore 6.0.
The most common issue for my renderings was related to pulling out media url using "sc:fld()" function and media item variable.
I had to substitute "sc:fld()" for "sc:GetMediaUrl()".

I thought I would have to do some modifications to get in-line editing working in V6. I was surprised that old buddy "sc:dot" represented this opportunity.
So, as a result it is not so bad as it sounds at the first glance ;-).
You should try it out!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice article Ivan! I will give it a try!

Kim Hornung said...

Hi Ivan,

I'm glad to hear that your conversion went smoothly...

The reason that inline editing works for you "out of the box" is actually not because of sc:dot but because you're using sc:text, sc:html, sc:link, sc:image, etc.

If you had been using C# code to render output and wanted to enable inline editing, you have two options. You can either use the cool new FieldRenderer class or you can the new webcontrols Sitecore.Web.UI.WebControls.Date, Image, etc.

Best Regards,
Kim

Ivan said...

Good to know. Thanks!

Per your request about the pure conversion time. My pure conversion time was 20 minutes to migrate all content according to documentation steps. I spent about 10 minutes to clean up solution from migration tool and rebuild search and link database indexes.