How to Upgrade Concrete5 version 5.6 to 5.7 or version 8 or to latest version released by Concrete CMS
Are you looking for, “How to Upgrade Concrete5 version 5.6 to 5.7 or version 8 or to latest version released by concrete CMS?”. The difficulty is arising especially when the Concrete5 users are trying to upgrade from (Concrete5 version 5.6 or earlier) TO (Concrete5 version 5.7 or any other latest version released by Concrete5 )
Website developers or Concrete5 users cannot Upgrade Concrete5 version 5.6 to 5.7 or version 8 or any “new upper versions of Concrete5 released after 5.7” directly from version 5.6 with just a few clicks from the back end. After searching a lot on the internet the Concrete5 users have to adopt the “Manual Upgrade Concrete5 version 5.6 to 5.7 or version 8\\\” or from version \\\”5.6 to version 8 directly\\\”. It is not possible to automatic upgrade Concrete5 5.6 to 5.7 with just a few clicks at back admin because the Concrete5 developers have not provided with an upgrade path for 5.6.* to 5.7. At last the Concrete5 users have to adopt the path of “Manual Upgrade Concrete5 version 5.6 to 5.7 or version 8 of Concrete5 “
Why there is no upgrade path between 5.6 and 5.7
- The difficulty arises because at the moment there is no upgrade path for 5.6. to 5.7 or to upper versions of Concrete5.
- The core of Concrete5 5.7 is completely rebuilt and therefore not compatible with earlier versions that is why no upgrade path compatibility can be set between them.
- Any block, package, and theme used in 5.6.*, also have to be converted to Concrete5 5.7 but the version 5.6 and 5.7 have nothing in common except the visual looks at the front end or back end. The base core structure of Concrete5 version 5.7 is advanced and is built with best practices.
Now the question arises that, why Concrete5 community guys took this hard decision of not providing upgrade path for 5.6.* to 5.7
Concrete5 community developers gave up the backward compatibility with this one version 5.6 and took this hard and serious to not provide with automatic upgrade feature which usually upgrades your Concrete5 site with just a few clicks at back admin. Another very famous platform “WordPress” has never has done it till date But, CMS Drupal developers do it frequently :-> to provide their users with best safe, secure and fast CMS. This time Concrete5 community developers have decided to go with the strategy of Drupal because they believe that, “Concrete5 has to go a long distance and to stay for long
The Concrete5 community developers claim that, to deliver the BEST CMS they have taken a bold decision to provide website users with a better version 5.7 which is fast, secure and completely based on the best practices in the field of website design and development. They have to leave the core structure that was used in Concrete5 version 5.6 or earlier and also stop support for version 5.6.
Further to support their decision of not providing automatic upgrade feature the Concrete5 community developers said that the Concrete5 was almost 6 years old and in these 6 years from its birth there were just too many new best practices and handy frameworks that have emerged and it was impossible to make it compatible while the upgrade with the basic core structure of Concrete5 version 5.6. The Concrete5 version 5.7’s core structure was completely different from the core structure of version 5.6 and hence they have to take the decision of not providing the automatic upgrade which works with few clicks.
Seeing what they have made with 5.7, we know it was well worth it.
As there is currently NO UPGRADE script from 5.6, this is a new version for new sites. You have to do the manual upgrade. At C5desk have converted many websites to version 5.7 and in that, we had to make a new theme and move content manually from our old site to the new site. And we are not finished yet because of the fact that a lot of blocks/packages we used on the old site has not yet been converted to 5.7.
There are some developers that are talking about making a tool to help to migrate from 5.6 to 5.7, but we tested their migration tools and we found that those migrations tools are at beta stage, buggy or making false claims. Those migrations are not of any help because when the original developers failed to provide the path between 5.6 and 5.7 that’s why I am very skeptic, and I can\\\’t see how that would be done. Mostly because you would have to make some code that automatically converted themes and packages to its new code base with namespaces and everything. The only tool that can work or work is the data migration tool. Data migration or content migration too only copy or export the content and when you import such content into new version it is placed in a distorted form which again needs a lot of settings. I found it is a complete waste of time and confusing Concrete5 users. Such migration tools can do some kind of export and import of content, not converting a whole site.
