How to Upgrade Prestashop 1.6 to 1.7 – My story

[pmates]

If you are looking for quick step-by-step guide on how to migrate PS1.6 to PS1.7, you can stop reading now. Spoiler alert, there is no such guide, which will guide you through your own migration. This is my story, with some lessons learned. My current store runs on PS1.6.1.23 and it works well. But still, I was planning to move to PS1.7 one day. I’ve been thinking about migration to PS1.7 for almost a year now. There are obvious reasons for doing so. On and off, I was trying to practice the migration. As probably everyone, I started with 1-click migration toll. I failed couple of times and eventually found a way for the upgrade to show “Upgrade successful” message. But those of you who did it, will know that 1-click upgrade is just a beginning. After upgrade, the layout of your page will be destroyed, backoffice will be crippled, modules will stop working and all sorts of issues will pop up. I’ve spent countless hours going back and forth. The scenario would be always similar. Move the store to development environment, prepare the store for upgrade, upgrade to PS1.6.1.24, upgrade to some version of PS1.7 most recently PS1.7.6.8 (upgrade to PS1.7.7.1 keeps on giving me errors) and then start fixing issues. Fix the access denied in the back office, fix the server error caused by blockrss module and a series of other issues. I already have 30-pages long manual on how to upgrade my store. But the end result is always the same. I would spend a full day, or even a weekend and in the end, tired and demotivated I would delete everything and call it a day and another failure. I’ve spent so much time already that if I had to pay myself, my store would go bankrupt. Now this is not to criticize PrestaShop, or its developers. I fully understand the complexity of migration to a new technology. And there is a wonderful community. Whenever you have an issue there is someone in community, who will help you. This is only to recognize that PrestaShop migration to a new major level is not an easy task and definitely not a 1-click matter.

My frustration led me to completely crazy scenarios like upgrading the database of my store to PS1.7 and injecting it to a fresh installation of the store. Failure. But yesterday I found a way, which shows the light at the end of the tunnel. There are online services, which will migrate data from old store to a new store. So instead of upgrading your store, you simply take the critical data (products, orders, clients) and start fresh with a new store. I will not name any service. There are few and they seem to be suspiciously similar. Just choose such, which will allow you to run the migration several times. Anyway. All it takes is installing a new PrestaShop 1.7 on another domain and trying their demo migration. It worked beautifully for me. In a matter of minutes, I had perfectly running PS1.7.7.1 with few of my products (I did not complete the full paid migration yet). And the more I’m thinking about it the more it makes sense. Going between major versions changes everything. Over time we all have made many modifications to our stores. We installed modules, changed templates or modified the code here and there. But in the new version, all of that is probably different. If you had modules, which are suitable for PS1.7, you will be able to install them and configure in few minutes. If you did any modifications, it is possible that you will not need them in the new version.

So for those of you, desperately struggling with upgrade of your store, consider this option as the way forward. It is a good opportunity to find a new theme for your store and start fresh. You will not lose your products, customers or orders. But you will start with a new, fully functional store, which you can again modify, customize and tweak as much as you want. Obviously, this will not be an option for everyone. But for some, it may be just the right thing to do. I’m with PrestaShop for already 6 years and never heard of such migration tools. If you are like me and never heard of them either, now you know