Upgrading from Modx 0.95

This is my first post so please be gentle. I apologise in advance if this is the wrong place to ask this question. I have spent about few hours trying to read up on this.

I have a site in Modx 0.95 which I'd like to upgrade.

I read Bob's Guide http://bobsguides.com/migrating-revolution.html

He says "Migrating an existing MODX site to MODX Revolution is definitely not for the faint of heart and absolutely not for people new to MODX. MODX Revolution hasn't officially been released yet and I suspect that there is no exhaustive list of the steps necessary to make the conversion."

Bob's site is quite old and I definately AM the "faint of heart" being a complete NOOB. I am willing to do some reading and work. I'm not even sure whether I'd not be better with Evo but it looks like Revo is the place I want to eventually end up.

Do you have any suggestions on where I should start reading to get up-to-date information on how to proceed?

Whether or not you should switch to Revolution depends on what the site is, and how big it is. Personally, I'd stick to Evolution (which is now up to 1.0.10). There are only a few things to watch out for with such an upgrade, while a transfer to Revolution is a totally different matter.

Quote from: sottwell at Sep 07, 2013, 05:26 AM

Whether or not you should switch to Revolution depends on what the site is, and how big it is. Personally, I'd stick to Evolution (which is now up to 1.0.10). There are only a few things to watch out for with such an upgrade, while a transfer to Revolution is a totally different matter.

Thanks for the quick reply. The site belongs to a church. It's got a fair bit of audio and a few videos. The content is pretty static being updated about once a week.

If Evo is still being developed and supported then I'll probably go with that if it makes for an easier life. Does anyone have any pointers about where to start reading about going from 0.95 to 1.0.10? Perhaps the older guides would do but I don't want to be following something step by step which is dated and leads me into trouble because things have moved on since it was written.

First, back up the site, files and database.

The only problems I've ever had in making such an extreme upgrade is in some of the snippets. So what I do is make sure to not overwrite the snippets folder with the new snippets, and don't have the snippets selected when running the installer. Then after the upgraded site is up and running I'll update the snippets one at a time so that I can easily change the options. The main differences you'll find are in AjaxSearch, and possibly Ditto options.

One way you can upgrade with a minimum of fuss is to upload the zip archive to your server, unzip it in its own folder, rename the root-level files and folders as "assets.new", "manager.new", "index.php.new", etc. then move them into the root alongside the originals. That way you're not overwriting your original site. Copy your original config.inc.php file to the new manager/includes directory and copy images, templates and any custom snippets, plugins etc to the new directories. Once all the .new files and folders are in place, rename the old top-level files and directories by adding .old to each of them. Then rename the new files and folders, removing the .new, and run the installer in upgrade mode (you did back up the database already, right?)

This way your site is offline only a few minutes, and if there's any problem you can be back live on the old site in just a couple of minutes by renaming the root-level files and folder back to .new and removing the .old from the originals, and importing your database backup.