Moving From 1.4.4.1 To 1.5.3.x And Big Mess With Category Id's

[dannyd]

Hello

 

I'm trying to update our store from version 1.4.4.1 to 1.5.3.1. After dedicating many days, I finally managed to perform such an update on localhost. Auto-upgrade is of course a whishful thinking and it never really works. Not even on fresh install. So I had to export specific sql tables from 1.4 and import them to 1.5 ( categories, products, customers, orders, etc. )

 

After importing data to 1.5, it seems to play well. However, category ID's must stay the same as they are on 1.4. Because if the ID's change then friendly URL's change, and all our efforts in seo-optimizing them go to waste. And I don't think that doing 301 redirects for 200 hundred categories is a good idea.

 

The problem lies in these 2 categories in prestashop 1.5:

 

- Root ( id 1 )

- Home ( id 2 )

 

Whereas on 1.4 there's only one root category with ID of 1. Hence, our category ID's ( on 1.4 ) start at number 2. And I can't import them to 1.5 starting with ID number 2, because it's already assigned to Home. Deleting Home doesn't help of course and it messes all up.

 

So I changed Home's ID in related database tables. After that I tried importing our categories starting with ID number 2 and with "Force ID's" selected. It doesn't work. It says that "categories with ID number of home/main categories cannot be imported", or something like that.

 

My questions then are, "Is there a way to change Home's ID and import categories starting with ID number 2?". "Maybe there's another way to accomplish this?".

 

All suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Edited February 28, 2013 by dannyd (see edit history)