Migrating/upgrading from old oscommerce version?

[Draxeiro]

Hello people,

 

Our shop runs on an old version of oscommerce, an early 2.2 if I am not not mistaken. In any case it is a snapshot from around august 2002. The shop software has been running smoothly over the years but due to various modifications throughout the years I guess an upgrade to the newest version is not really an option anymore.

 

But seeing as how the software has developed over the last 5 years we feel it is probably best to start using the newest version soon. Since I am just far too busy with the business these days, I need to have another company do it for us. To do it myself, as I did all those years ago is just not an option anymore.

 

As such we approached a company we worked with before.

 

And were a bit surprised by their reaction, instead of taking up the job and trying to earn money from us, they told us upgrading to another version might give problems and if our current shop works properly that is maybe best to continue on that path for the time being since there is no pressing need to upgrade.

 

But then, since we're working with a 5 year old version wouldn't the security issues with older versions alone be reason enough to upgrade?

 

By the way, is their a list somewhere, I want to make sure if there are any holes that need patching in the meantime?

 

Aside from possible security issues I guess osc will have gotten more reliable since, plus bugs will have been ironed out.

 

So that's why I felt it would be better to ask the experts here: how necessary would you say it is to migrate/update to the newest version?

 

But if we do, how to best go about it?

 

Since the shop has existed for some years now it contains thousands of products, customers and order information. It is of the utmost importance that the products (attributes preferably too), customers and order data gets included in the new shop.

 

I am not sure what has been changed to the db over the years, not that much I think. Still, better safe than sorry. Would it, in that respect, be better to just export the customer and product data from the old db and import that into the new db?

 

Will that work without any problems?

 

Or do you suggest another way?

 

Please give me some info on this if you can. I feel going to a new version would be the smart thing to do, but at the same time we cannot afford to loose the customer data and such.

 

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Draxeiro]

I am sure there are a lot of experts here on the forum, can anybody shed some light on this for me?

[Nullachtfuffzehn]

There has been some changes to OSC in the meanwhile for sure. But most of them were bugfixes, some are improvements, nothing real big. Those bugfixes and ecurity patches are imho reason enough to upgrade to the latest version. Depending on which version you are running now and how much customization you did to the store, one could go through it and apply all the fixes/patches from version to version to bring your shop up to date. The other way would be to install the latest version and put in all the latest versions of the contribs you've installed, which would be the cleanest way.

 

What goes to the data, the table structure hasn't changes that much, that your data will be lost. There were some field definitions changed for security reasons and some were added for improvements, but nothing real big.

 

Another reason why an update should be made, is that the hosting companies are upgrading their webservers to PHP/MySQL 5 more an more, so the old shop version will come up with errors if yours is upgrading too, which will undoubtedly happen in the near future as long as you don't run your own dedicated server.

 

Hope that helps a bit.

[Draxeiro]

Hi Manfred,

 

That helps indeed. Thanks a lot.

 

Truthfully I think installing the latest version + the latest versions of the contributions would probably be the best way.

 

With regards to the data. Just using the old db on the new version wouldn't work then I guess since you say there have been some changes and such.

 

So will it be a matter of importing the contents of the tables that contain the product data, attributes, customer and order data? And that should work?