Upgrading from 0.9.6.3 to 2.0.0?

I have a site running on MODx 0.9.6.3 that I’m now planning to upgrade. I see that MODx 2.0.0 was released recently, and I was wondering whether it might be practical/easy(ish) to upgrade this site to 2.0.0, rather than 1.0.x, as had been my original plan? (I realise that this may be a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question..)

I’m still flicking through the Revo documentation, but it seems that there have been a significant number of changes in MODx internally, and possibly also that a lot of commonly-used external components will need to be rewritten?

In MODx terms, I don’t think our site is particularly tightly-integrated into very many components: most of the pages are fairly ’vanilla’ MODx pages, with some use of chunks and template variables, etc. In terms of snippets, we use Wayfinder for menus, Ditto (etc) for a news section (which we probably need to rewrite/improve anyway), and a fair number of our own snippets (which don’t really tie into MODx and are mostly just "normal" PHP code).

Possibly it may be an advantage for us that we hadn’t yet got far enough along the MODx learning curve to write code that integrated ’properly’ into MODx(!), so maybe the changes in Revo wouldn’t affect our site much.

Would it make sense to try to upgrade the site to Revo, or would I be better off sticking with the same codebase and just upgrading the Evo version instead? I have maybe a couple of days set aside for the site upgrade, but if it would turn out to be an awful lot of work to switch from 0.9.6.3 to 2.0.0, I suspect it would probably not be time well spent (for me), and I should just stick to Evo?

Thanks for any advice.

Unless you need elements that are only available in REvo I would suggest sticking to Evo as there is no upgrade at the moment.

http://bobsguides.com/migrating-revolution.html is a good starting point if you do decide to go with Revo though

fwiw I would suggest you set up a local dev server with the same specs (PHP MYSQL) as your existing site.

Then I would install Revo in local server and try if it doesn’t work you have lost nothing if it does and from what you say it should without to much.

That way you will know what the problems are before you start, no messing with existing site until you have all your ducks in a row.
There is still plenty to go wrong but the hurdles are not so high.

Good luck and happy Revo-ing.

Thanks for your replies.

Looks like there’s at least one more obstacle that I hadn’t considered: the changes to the tag syntax.
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/Tag+Syntax

Will Revo understand tags in existing documents which are in Evo format, or does this mean I’d have to go and find and change every tag in every document to convert it to the new Revo format?

It is starting to look as though trying to upgrade an existing Evo site may well be more difficult than I’d realised. (Yes, I was planning to upgrade by duplicating the site onto a new server and then upgrading that copy.)

I know you can never predict the future, but is it currently in the plan to support (and continue developing) Evolution for at least a good few years yet?

Evo isn’t going anywhere. It will still be supported and developed for the foreseeable future. However, I do believe that there are utilities available for converting all Evo tags to the corresponding Revo tags.