Follow us on Twitter X-Cart on Facebook Wiki
Shopping cart software Solutions for online shops and malls

v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

 
Reply
   X-Cart forums > News and Announcements
 
Thread Tools
  #11  
Old 03-18-2019, 07:07 AM
 
Triple A Racing Triple A Racing is offline
 

X-Wizard
  
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Manchester UK
Posts: 1,028
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Our opinion FWIW is this:

If you're perfectly happy using your XC4 store, then don't change anything! It's still going to be very well supported by lots of good, Non X-Cart companies as well as X-Cart themselves. Quite simple really.

If you feel the need for change and you do want to change from XC4 to XC5 then do it (as we did a long time ago as an early XC5 adopter). However.... we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch (see below)

THIS post, in another thread on the XC4 / XC5 subject, is possibly a good explanation as to why and we agree wholeheartedly with the "start from scratch" comment that's made in that post. You'll need time and resources to do this though, don't forget.

Meaning, build your XC5 store (and a mimic dev store we'd say) on a separate server / host whilst you continue to trade with your XC4 store. This gives you time to test / check and then re-test and re-check everything but with no loss of online trading at all. Once you've checked the checker and your XC5 store is 100% good to go, make your DNS changes and switch over from XC4 to XC5. Afterwards, archive everything in detail from your XC4 store for future reference and then extract all records that you might need, in a format that you can easy access locally. That's worked quite well for us.

The last paragraph is what we did (and at a time suitable for annual accounts too) We had an FAQ section explaining the changes and why XC4 accounts / profiles etc were no longer valid and advising customers who wanted an XC5 account / profile to create a new one etc (although quite often, customers order anonymously anyway and then they repeat order anonymously which is easy to do in XC5, so it wasn't a big issue at all in the end. Your experience might vary obviously but...

Finally, if you're totally new to X-Cart, than it makes common and commercial sense to opt for XC5 because a) you cannot buy an XC4 licence now anyway but seriously b) Once your'e past the steep learning curve and feeling comfortable with creating your XC5 own modules (or buying very well developed third party XC5 modules, of which, there are quite a few) then XC5 can be very heavily customised to your satisfaction, but in a way that dispenses with "patches" and "reworking core coding" etc when it comes to installing the latest XC5 upgrades.

XC5 is far from perfect, but it's 1000% better than it was, when it was first launched. We're really quite happy with it (most of the time) these days.
__________________
Dev Store & Live Store XC Business 5.4.1.35
Server; Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (HWE 6.2.0.26.26 Kernel)) / Plesk Obsidian
Nginx 1.20.4 / Apache 2.4.52 (Ubuntu Backported) / MariaDB 10.11.4 / PHP 7.4.33
Reply With Quote

The following user thanks Triple A Racing for this useful post:
tony_sologubov (03-25-2019)
  #12  
Old 03-18-2019, 07:27 AM
  cflsystems's Avatar 
cflsystems cflsystems is offline
 

Veteran
  
Join Date: Apr 2007
Posts: 14,189
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Quote:
Originally Posted by Triple A Racing
However.... we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch (see below)

I don't really agree with this.

If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now.

If you have customized store - getting the data transferred with custom scripts is the way to go. And it is possible. I have done it on few stores so far and there is no problem with this approach.

Starting from scratch is acceptable if you are willing to lose all data you have in the store but usually this is not the case.

It does cost to do custom scripts but there is also the factor of pissed off customers who will go to your competition if you choose to start from scratch. Weight the risk vs cost in a long run. There is always a solution or should we call it "the lesser evil"...
__________________
Steve Stoyanov
CFLSystems.com
Web Development
Reply With Quote

The following user thanks cflsystems for this useful post:
ITVV (03-18-2019)
  #13  
Old 03-18-2019, 07:50 AM
 
Triple A Racing Triple A Racing is offline
 

X-Wizard
  
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Manchester UK
Posts: 1,028
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
I don't really agree with this
Well that's good! We did say it was our opinion FWIW and that "Your experience might vary..."
Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now
Yep we still wouldn't, but it maybe as you say "the lesser evil" in this specific case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
If you have customized store - getting the data transferred with custom scripts is the way to go. And it is possible. I have done it on few stores so far and there is no problem with this approach
We know YOU definitely could provide such scripts but we mentioned scripts (and tricks) because many people "think" they can simply write their own script (having never written one before) run it and boom! Job done. That's not reality unfortunately.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
Starting from scratch is acceptable if you are willing to lose all data you have in the store but usually this is not the case
There's no need to lose all data. You can (and we did) transfer i.e. copy, edit and upload XC4 product data to XC5. It's a slow process sure, but you're not losing any trading as your XC4 store is still live whilst this is going on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
It does cost to do custom scripts but there is also the factor of pissed off customers who will go to your competition if you choose to start from scratch. Weight the risk vs cost in a long run. There is always a solution or should we call it "the lesser evil"...
If you don't do it correctly and have downtime, yes agreed, but that wasn't our experience to be fair. Our XC4 stored traded until day XX and then our XC5 store took over. A seamless change at 2:00am on day XX. From memory, we didn't have any "pissed off" customers go elsewhere because they had to create a fresh XC5 profile, but they could have just voted silently of course
__________________
Dev Store & Live Store XC Business 5.4.1.35
Server; Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (HWE 6.2.0.26.26 Kernel)) / Plesk Obsidian
Nginx 1.20.4 / Apache 2.4.52 (Ubuntu Backported) / MariaDB 10.11.4 / PHP 7.4.33
Reply With Quote
  #14  
Old 03-20-2019, 10:13 PM
 
Triple A Racing Triple A Racing is offline
 

X-Wizard
  
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Manchester UK
Posts: 1,028
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now...
Quite possibly, just pure coincidence and/or the store owner's (or their service provider's) error, but the first item on the list in THIS POST yesterday...
__________________
Dev Store & Live Store XC Business 5.4.1.35
Server; Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (HWE 6.2.0.26.26 Kernel)) / Plesk Obsidian
Nginx 1.20.4 / Apache 2.4.52 (Ubuntu Backported) / MariaDB 10.11.4 / PHP 7.4.33
Reply With Quote
  #15  
Old 03-25-2019, 02:36 AM
  tony_sologubov's Avatar 
tony_sologubov tony_sologubov is offline
 

X-Cart team
  
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 2,431
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Hi guys!

Thank you so much for your feedback! It is truly appreciated.

I would want to address several points mentioned in the discussion:
Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
Any other way of making changes to XC5 should be consider temporary and unsafe. Even the built-in template modifier won't do you much good if you need to edit template multiple times or replace a template...

You can pretty safely apply changes to templates via Webmaster Mode. If there are cases in which it does not work, please give me an example as we would want to address that.

Besides that, X-Cart 5.4 will have more tools to edit templates out of the box, including adding new templates.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Triple A Racing
we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch

I would agree with you a couple of years ago, but since then we heavily improved our Migration Wizard module. I work on migration data pretty much every day and if you have a small to medium size store, you can migrate your data within 15-30 minutes. And the store will work perfectly fine after that.
https://market.x-cart.com/addons/migration-wizard.html

However, I do agree that if you have custom functionality or just a specific store's config, it will require you to test quite a bit to make sure that X-Cart 5 works exactly as you need. We have piled up a checklist to help you with this task:
https://kb.x-cart.com/modules/xc4_to_xc5_migration_wizard/using_the_xc4_to_xc5_migration_wizard.html#check...ore-going-live
__________________
Found a bug in X-Cart? Post it to our bug tracker!
Know how to make X-Cart better? Suggest an idea!
Reply With Quote

The following user thanks tony_sologubov for this useful post:
Triple A Racing (03-28-2019)
  #16  
Old 03-25-2019, 02:37 AM
  tony_sologubov's Avatar 
tony_sologubov tony_sologubov is offline
 

X-Cart team
  
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 2,431
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

If you have any questions/comments about the upgrade process from X-Cart 4 to X-Cart 5, I will be happy to address them.

Just let me know!

Tony
__________________
Found a bug in X-Cart? Post it to our bug tracker!
Know how to make X-Cart better? Suggest an idea!
Reply With Quote
  #17  
Old 03-25-2019, 08:08 AM
  cflsystems's Avatar 
cflsystems cflsystems is offline
 

Veteran
  
Join Date: Apr 2007
Posts: 14,189
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Quote:
Originally Posted by tony_sologubov
I would agree with you a couple of years ago, but since then we heavily improved our Migration Wizard module. I work on migration data pretty much every day and if you have a small to medium size store, you can migrate your data within 15-30 minutes. And the store will work perfectly fine after that.


Please define "small to medium size store".
I have done it with stores with about:
- 2599 customers
- 50-200 categories

- 1000 - 1500 products
- 5000-10000 orders
- not counting the rest - like settings, pages, reviews, options, variants, etc


It takes couple hours. Which is still pretty fast compared to what it was before. And I consider this somewhere between small and medium size store more towards the small store size. So it is not 15-20 minutes.
__________________
Steve Stoyanov
CFLSystems.com
Web Development
Reply With Quote
  #18  
Old 03-25-2019, 11:32 AM
  tony_sologubov's Avatar 
tony_sologubov tony_sologubov is offline
 

X-Cart team
  
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 2,431
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
Please define "small to medium size store".
I have done it with stores with about:
- 2599 customers
- 50-200 categories

- 1000 - 1500 products
- 5000-10000 orders
- not counting the rest - like settings, pages, reviews, options, variants, etc


It takes couple hours. Which is still pretty fast compared to what it was before. And I consider this somewhere between small and medium size store more towards the small store size. So it is not 15-20 minutes.

I would say this is a medium size store.
Just recently I migrated a store with kind of the same numbers and it took me about 30 minutes.
I used X-Cart hosting as a server environment for that.
__________________
Found a bug in X-Cart? Post it to our bug tracker!
Know how to make X-Cart better? Suggest an idea!
Reply With Quote
  #19  
Old 03-25-2019, 03:45 PM
  cflsystems's Avatar 
cflsystems cflsystems is offline
 

Veteran
  
Join Date: Apr 2007
Posts: 14,189
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

To give you complete picture I don't actually stay and look at the screen waiting for it to finish I turn it on, it says 1 hour left or 2 hours left and I go to lunch. It runs pretty consistently so my guess is the time shown is somewhat accurate.


Anyway - whether it is 30 min or 1 hour - the point is the migration wizard is running pretty good now for stock stores. Still few hiccups to take care of - as outlined by me earlier - but in general it works ok.
__________________
Steve Stoyanov
CFLSystems.com
Web Development
Reply With Quote

The following user thanks cflsystems for this useful post:
tony_sologubov (03-26-2019)
  #20  
Old 03-26-2019, 12:39 AM
  tony_sologubov's Avatar 
tony_sologubov tony_sologubov is offline
 

X-Cart team
  
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 2,431
 

Default Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5

Quote:
Originally Posted by cflsystems
Anyway - whether it is 30 min or 1 hour - the point is the migration wizard is running pretty good now for stock stores. Still few hiccups to take care of - as outlined by me earlier - but in general it works ok.

Thanks for the kind words, Steve! I appreciate it!

Tony
__________________
Found a bug in X-Cart? Post it to our bug tracker!
Know how to make X-Cart better? Suggest an idea!
Reply With Quote
Reply
   X-Cart forums > News and Announcements


Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 01:09 AM.

   

 
X-Cart forums © 2001-2020