Upgrading from EVO

Reposted here from the EVO section on the suggestions of a member -

I've spent quite a while searching to see the possibilities for upgrading my site from the current Evolution version to Revolution but I'm no clearer as to the best way to approach it.

The site is reasonable straight forward but is likely to become more complex in the future hence thinking that upgrading now is going to be simpler and give more development options than sticking with Evo.

The only 'custom' additions on the current site are a FAQ page and the gallery plug in.

What's the current thinking on the best way to upgrade ? Anyone done this recently ?

Thanks in advance

David

Personally I like to approach it as a migration. You can use Provisioner to suck in the content to a clean Revo install, and at that point start changing the old Evo calls to their new Revo counterparts. I wouldn't expect much one-on-one compatibility in terms of snippet code; this compatibility layer was removed in 2.1.

I think you are wise to upgrade sooner rather than later. If you can get Provisioner to move your content, you should be able to manage the rest of it.

Check out EZfaq for your FAQ. If you are using a separate resource for each Q and A pair, it will be more efficient, though you may be able to do a minor rewrite of your current code.

The gallery may be more of a challenge to migrate, though it it's your own custom code, it may be easy to port to Revo.

Cheers both.

I'll set up a clean Rev install and try Provisioner and clean up from there. Presumably once it's 'done' I can then move the working revo site to it's new server using ftp \ db restore.

Or you can use the Vapor scripts to package up your site and then install it in the new location. This works on any site, not just MODx Cloud sites. http://sottwell.com/articles/modx-cloud/

thanks for that, I'll check it out.

I'm pretty much completed the upgrade. Generally it was reasonably straight forward with just a couple of missing plug ins. The big problem for me (at the script kiddie end of the scale of ability) was the gallery. In the end I gave up and used a solution I'd already purchased for another site.

On a positive note the Articles 'blog' plug in seems excellent and will be worth the upgrade alone.

However, the blot on the horizon is the speed the site is running at. The front end is a little slower than the Evo version but the manager is really slow, to the point where developing on it will be much slower. I have them both hosted on the same shared server.

Is there anything I can do to optimise the Revo install to speed it up a bit ?

Minify the css and javascript and optimize the graphics. The same thing you would normally do on a site.

Also, turn off plugins such as firebug which inherently slow down site presentation.

I'll try the firebug suggestion to help with the manager. It's a small\simple site so it should work pretty fast.

Most of the time I'm using the quick-edit-options for chunks,snippets,templates,resources.
Only if I need to edit TVs or special-Fields I use the normal Form.

If I have to edit and create lots of children-rescources of some parents, I create a MIGXdb - TV.
This way I have grid-TV with my children-resources where I can edit/create/filter/search/remove them with my very own configured form-window.

You may also try to have static elements and working remote on the files with a good web-editor (for example phpDesigner)

ExtJS seems to run faster on Google Chrom than on firefox.