Answered MODX 0.9.6.3 update to Revo

I have been doing a lot of EVO -> REVO updates in the past three months.

Using Provisioner is essential, but not the end of the process.

Provisioner doesn't like to move assets from the old EVO to REVO... you have to do that manually through ftp.

Any snippets that were written will need to be reviewed as accessing classes and db records change a bit from EVO to REVO. THe more custom snippets that call to the database, the more work to be done to refactor them.

Important note is that mentally, you need to think of this less as a conversion and more of a population of content and data from and evo site to a revo site, as you are essentially filling a new REVO database with content (pages, chunks, snippets, templates, tvs) from an evo database. Provisioner does some of the heavy lifting by converting tag syntaxes and changing Ditto to getResources as best it can, but there are limits.

Here is a brief process I use to do an EVO->REVO conversion:

1. Set up new database for REVO set on target server
2. Install a fresh REVO 2.2.16 install on target server (Provisioner seems to work best in 2.2.16 currently)
3. Install Provisioner, getResources and Wayfinder in new REVO install
4. Backup Evo site + database (always a good idea when dealing with automated import scripts)
5. Upload revogateway to assets/snippets of EVO site
6. Zip assets/js and assets/site files OR tar the assets folder to wget after conversion
7. Import Evo into Revo via Provisioner. NOTE. Provisioner creates a Provisioner context, so when you import make sure you tell it which context to put it in.
8. Upload/wget EVO asset files
9. Reinstall addons (the import sometimes mucks up the packages)
10. Update users with correct passwords (need to be known prior to conversion since the HASHing is different between EVO and REVO)
11. Update jQuery version if needed
12. TEST 2.2.16 VERSION OF SITE FIRST... then either fix or....
13. Upgrade REVO site to 2.3.1
14. TEST SITE IN 2.3.1.

• I prefer to use pdoTools over GetResources, Wayfinder, etc. So I go into the site after words and convert all my tags to the pdoTools equivalent (fortunately pdoTools can use the same parameter names).
• Also, eForm, if used in EVO, has no direct equivalent in REVO, so you will need to rebuild your forms using FormIt, Formz, mxFormBuilder, etc.
• Same for AJAXSearch... need to install SimpleSearch and manually convert tags.

This process has worked well, with some adjusting needed here and there depending on the complexity of the EVO site.

Don't bother importing plugins, from my experience they never work in REVO.

oh, and DO NOT TICK THE COPY PARENT CATEGORIES BOX on the import pane. It causes all kinds of issues as the categories never come in nicely and it takes going into the database and changing category fields on the records to fix. If this doesn't make sound familiar, then don't worry about it (the box is unticked by default).

If you are able to import the pages into the tree, and the site is still showing white, check you server error logs as well as modx error logs. Most of the time is is a snippet error due to the version change. I had an EVO gallery add on that was causing issues with one of my converts and it drove me nuts until I figured out what part was not jiving with REVO.

Hopefully this helps. Once I get through the remaining 10 EVO conversions I have this quarter, I will put together a tutorial on what I find works best.