Words of advice regarding updating to V8
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Hi everyone,
V8 is here and it's incredibly exciting - there's a whole bunch of new features and improvements - an enormous amount of work has gone into it and we'll all benefit from this.
With it being a final 8.0 release, it's time to start using it for new projects, ensuring that themes and add-ons continue to work with it, basically putting it through its paces in production style environments.
However, please keep in mind that although the core team and github contributors do their best to test everything, concrete5's codebase and it's ecosystem is hugely complex - it's arguably one of the most complex CMS out there.
With such a large revision there are naturally going to be further issues to resolve, undiscovered bugs and upgrade scenarios that haven't been tested yet.
Many/most of these issues are difficult to discover without real-world usage.
So the advice I'd give in this situation is:
If you have a site you are actively working on, or a simpler production site you wish to try upgrading to v8, take lots of backups and ensure you know how to restore from them.
If you don't feel 100% confident that you can restore a site back to how it was pre-update, don't take the risk. Be patient and wait for a few point releases that will fix critical bugs, or wait for when it gets offered as an update through concrete5's dashboard.
Taking backups and knowing how to restore from them is excellent practice at any point when you upgrade a website, but it's absolutely critical with this type of shiny new release.
If you have production site you really want to update, my advice here would be to take a full copy and trial the upgrade on that. If you do hit issues, you can then investigate and report on them without impacting your live site. Using a secondary copy like this is referred to 'staging' and is common practice in the IT world anyway.
-Ryan
V8 is here and it's incredibly exciting - there's a whole bunch of new features and improvements - an enormous amount of work has gone into it and we'll all benefit from this.
With it being a final 8.0 release, it's time to start using it for new projects, ensuring that themes and add-ons continue to work with it, basically putting it through its paces in production style environments.
However, please keep in mind that although the core team and github contributors do their best to test everything, concrete5's codebase and it's ecosystem is hugely complex - it's arguably one of the most complex CMS out there.
With such a large revision there are naturally going to be further issues to resolve, undiscovered bugs and upgrade scenarios that haven't been tested yet.
Many/most of these issues are difficult to discover without real-world usage.
So the advice I'd give in this situation is:
If you have a site you are actively working on, or a simpler production site you wish to try upgrading to v8, take lots of backups and ensure you know how to restore from them.
If you don't feel 100% confident that you can restore a site back to how it was pre-update, don't take the risk. Be patient and wait for a few point releases that will fix critical bugs, or wait for when it gets offered as an update through concrete5's dashboard.
Taking backups and knowing how to restore from them is excellent practice at any point when you upgrade a website, but it's absolutely critical with this type of shiny new release.
If you have production site you really want to update, my advice here would be to take a full copy and trial the upgrade on that. If you do hit issues, you can then investigate and report on them without impacting your live site. Using a secondary copy like this is referred to 'staging' and is common practice in the IT world anyway.
-Ryan
