Kentico 6 Upgrade - what we know

We thought to start the new year we will give you a few tips on how we have been finding the upgrade process over the past few months of the new Kentico 6.0 CMS. This blog coincides with our ramping of the new CMS both in house and to market.

The first thing I would like to stress is how easy we actually found the upgrade process. For a simple site with no major customizations the process is nearly fully automatic, in fact in some cases it is 100% automatic. The system does a good job of isolating any changed core files (not good practice, but sometimes necessary) and provides a list of these files ready for a developer to compare and deal with.

The new Kentico Management Software that is installed when you do a new installation is easy to use and intuitive. We did stumble across a problem with our first hot fix installation in that we failed to turn off the health monitoring windows service causing issues with locked files. This rendered the installation broken so we had to restore from the backup and try again. A quick call to support soon got us back on our feet with the support member admitting they also did the same thing the first time the applied a hot fix. Maybe an area for improvement in the future?

Another small problem we found is when you have multiple sites in the Management Software, it is sometimes confusing when you want to only apply a hot fix to one site. Probably just user error and nothing at all major.

One area we did find more major issues was with upgrading our own sites www.webdesignmagic.com.au and www.konsult.com.au from 5.5 R2 to 6.0 under medium trust. We had to jump through a few hoops to get our host to install the MS Charts plugin required under medium trust. Whilst not an issue under .NET 4.0 our host uses .NET 3.5 so we had to make the installation otherwise we would receive a security policy error. More details here.

We have also had to upgrade some sites from 4.0 to 6.0. As there is no automatic upgrade (only from 5.5 R2 to 6.0 is support automatically) we exported the site and imported into the new version successfully using the standard import/export features of Kentico. This was impressive. The same cannot be said with the API components that needed to be manually upgraded from API 4.0 to API 6.0. More tedious than challenging.

Overall we definitely recommend the upgrade. Not only does the new version have great new features and of course the EMS, but the ease of installing hot fixes and performance enhancements simply out weigh the time to perform the upgrade. I am sure you will feel the same way when you do your upgrade.

If you require someone with the experience like Web Design Magic then let us upgrade your Kentico CMS. Simply contact our office on 1300 308 210 or use our contact us form.