Recommended practices when closing the store for update??

[nac78]

First of all many thanks for the Prestashop team for this great software!

I'm running 1.3.1 version and my store has been opened since 2 months already and everything has been quite positive until now. But now comes the BIG step and challenge of updating the store after having it opened.

I would like to read comments and opinions of other experienced colleagues on how you make your own updates,
how you close your stores and how you tell to the customers that the store will be closed for software update.

I'm very scared of promising a time lapse that will be longer, so do you notify them at all before closing the store (probably done at night??) or how?

I've been thinking of closing the entire domain with a httaccess file in the root directory. I don't know how you can use the Prestashop mantainance message if you anyway need to change the name of the old installation directory. Is it possible to use it during the update installation?

- What if something goes wrong during the update and you need more time than the notified to the customers, did you have experiences like this? How customers react?

- Do you test your new versions somewhere else? Do you import your customer data to the test DB for testing?

[Joachim Tranberg]

Have you modified core files and modules?

[nac78]

Yes I did, look this other post to see what I modified
http://www.prestashop.com/forums/viewthread/72915/#312540