Upgrading to Umbraco 7.3

A week or so ago Niels from Umbraco tweeted that you could now upgrade the database from an old 4.7.1 install all the way up to 7.3 with the new installer. This was pretty exciting news, as upgrading Umbraco (especially through a lot of versions) is traditionally a very painful experience.

As luck would have it, we had a client who wants to update an old 4.7.1 site to 7.3 to use some of the newer features. Fortuitously, it's also a fairly simple Umbraco install with only handful of plugins, most of which aren't needed in 7.

So, fully expecting things to not go as smoothly as expected, I embarked on my upgrade quest. I decided to do a fresh install of 7.3 via Nuget into a VS project, and then merge in the relevant config bits into the site. I'd check the database had upgraded OK, then add back in the bits that I needed. Next I pointed the installer at the old 4.7.1 database (use the customize option during the setup wizard). Finally I copied in my masterpages, CSS, JS and images.

I ran the wizard and immediately hit an error that I thought was down to some of the additional tables in the database, but which turned out to be down to an issue with schema ownership in the database. Once I'd fixed that, I ran the installer again, and crossed my fingers. About a minute later, and BAM!!! I was staring at the 7.3 back office with all of the content from the old site in it!

I went through the site, and everything seemed to be working fine, happy days! I then swapped the uComponents tree pickers for the built in multinode pickers (as I was storing them as CSV already), and viola, it all worked! I had to go through and re-add some of the associated packages, but other than that, I was golden. I ran into a couple of minor gotchas on the XSLT front, mostly caused by the site using EXSLT extensions that were removed from the site in v7. Those were pretty straighforward to fix though.

All in all, I'm very impressed with the way it went, it really was remarkably straightforward, and it makes upgrading much older sites a much more appealing prospect. If you have a more complex site with tons of custom DataTypes etc, you'll need to port those to Angular and migrate the data, but for most simple sites, it should be relatively painless to upgrade from the look of it.

Kudos to the HQ guys for the hard work they've put into this, it looks like the effort paid off!

Once I've fully completed the upgrade, I'll document it here on my blog, to help anyone else who's considering upgrading older sites.