Coming from many years of DotNetNuke hacking and thinking of switching horses, I am doing my due diligence.
I'd be interested to hear of anyone else who has switch allegiances.
One of our big issues is bloat. Have look at DNN Forum if you want a laugh. We have found a hack to sort this, shrinking a 23MB install zip to about 8Mb but it is still big and contains a heap of unneeded overheads.
As I'm sure most programmers do we always hacked DNN to get it to do what we (or more often our customers) wanted. The big problem was updates. It was always a nightmare because in each update DNN give you virtually the WHOLE web root including all the files that had not been updated.
So we had to do a file compare with the unadulterated edition to see what had changed and then another file compare to see if any of the updated files were ones we had hacked.
Do uCommerce updates contain only the updated files? And for that matter does umbraco do the same?
BTW I apologise if my questions have been answered elsewhere and I've not seen them.
Incidentally I found the best way to search the forum is to get to the thread you are interested in e.g. Home» Projects» Website utilities» uCommerce» uCommerce Support
Then start a new topic and put your search term in the subject and start typing in the text area. Amazingly the Start Topic has filtered by the local node and the Subject text box has done the search I was after.
Maybe this functionality could be added to the forum search, Search this thread?
Updates are notoriously difficult to do well. What we're doing with uCommerce is basically use the same process for clean installs and updates. When you install uCommerce it takes a look at what's there to begin with. If a version of uCommerce is found it will migrate that install to the later version. Most of the time this is all there is to it.
There's is one caveat to it: XML files. Migrating XML files is not a straightforward process so essentially we decided to make it so uCommerce resets configs to their original state upon each install. uCommerce will do a backup of the old file and you'll typically be able to replace the reset file with your old one and go on your merry way.
The process is described in the article Checklist for Updating uCommerce and basically runs through every scenario you might come across.
Even though it's pretty good as is we're actively looking at making the update process more seamless. It's something in other products that has bothered me for years so I'd really like to see it even better.
Umbraco does much the same thing. Updating Umbraco will roll the database forward, but still reset your config files to default states. This means that if you have to update both Umbraco and uCommerce. The process is to first update Umbraco and then roll on uCommerce to ensure that all configs are updated to their proper state.
How are updates handled?
Coming from many years of DotNetNuke hacking and thinking of switching horses, I am doing my due diligence.
I'd be interested to hear of anyone else who has switch allegiances.
One of our big issues is bloat. Have look at DNN Forum if you want a laugh. We have found a hack to sort this, shrinking a 23MB install zip to about 8Mb but it is still big and contains a heap of unneeded overheads.
As I'm sure most programmers do we always hacked DNN to get it to do what we (or more often our customers) wanted.
The big problem was updates. It was always a nightmare because in each update DNN give you virtually the WHOLE web root including all the files that had not been updated.
So we had to do a file compare with the unadulterated edition to see what had changed and then another file compare to see if any of the updated files were ones we had hacked.
Do uCommerce updates contain only the updated files? And for that matter does umbraco do the same?
BTW I apologise if my questions have been answered elsewhere and I've not seen them.
Incidentally I found the best way to search the forum is to get to the thread you are interested in e.g.
Home» Projects» Website utilities» uCommerce» uCommerce Support
Then start a new topic and put your search term in the subject and start typing in the text area. Amazingly the Start Topic has filtered by the local node and the Subject text box has done the search I was after.
Maybe this functionality could be added to the forum search, Search this thread?
William
Hi William,
Updates are notoriously difficult to do well. What we're doing with uCommerce is basically use the same process for clean installs and updates. When you install uCommerce it takes a look at what's there to begin with. If a version of uCommerce is found it will migrate that install to the later version. Most of the time this is all there is to it.
There's is one caveat to it: XML files. Migrating XML files is not a straightforward process so essentially we decided to make it so uCommerce resets configs to their original state upon each install. uCommerce will do a backup of the old file and you'll typically be able to replace the reset file with your old one and go on your merry way.
The process is described in the article Checklist for Updating uCommerce and basically runs through every scenario you might come across.
Even though it's pretty good as is we're actively looking at making the update process more seamless. It's something in other products that has bothered me for years so I'd really like to see it even better.
Umbraco does much the same thing. Updating Umbraco will roll the database forward, but still reset your config files to default states. This means that if you have to update both Umbraco and uCommerce. The process is to first update Umbraco and then roll on uCommerce to ensure that all configs are updated to their proper state.
Hope this helps.
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