Upgrade Magento 1.4 to 1.7: Be in Step With the Times
Perhaps no surprise that the largest share on e-Commerce market goes to Magento shopping cart. It is widely known as stable and feature-rich solution for successful online business. One of the main reasons why more and more web store owners prefer Magento is its constant updates and innovations. The new version is always better than the previous one and it always provides a variety of new features and options for the store management. Are you a Magento shop owner? Are you thinking about the update of your Magento 1.4 to 1.7? Look through this article and be sure that it is not a big deal.
Magento 1.4 was released in 2010 and was in good odor even till now. This version
made a furor offering a wide range of extensions and enhancements: Widgets were settled as a stable software after a year of testing. They allowed
to enjoy more CMS capabilities with a possibility for non-technicians not only to change the content of blocks, but also to replace them. WYSIWYG editor became native for Magento 1.4 and offered easy editing of categories and product descriptions. Also, many e-merchants liked the changes in payment options, which made their administrative panel more organized and convenient. However, e-Commerce has changed a lot since that time. There appeared new needs and requirements, so developers lead the charge. It is obvious that new Magento 1.7 can boast of much more impressive set of possibilities. Magento provides a multi-store creation. You can control a number of stores with the help of single administrative panel. It is a real catch for those who want to have many shops with different domains but to manage them in one place. Moreover, now there is a great feature of system backup. It offers three types of backup: System Backup; Database and Media; Database. You can name backup you’re doing and while the process is going on, your store will be put in maintenance mode. While registration, signing in or some other customer-related actions, there appears Zend_Captcha. It is considered as a good solution to decrease a spam. In addition to all these updates, 1.7 version takes care about related products management. Now you don’t have to add them by yourself, it will generate related products, cross-sells and up-sells with one-click action. Magento 1.7 also surprises with new iphone app design and possibility to set prices for each customer group. Furthermore, developers made a step to meet EU cookie law and added an option of messaging and requesting a permission of the customers when there is a necessity to turn on the cookies on the site. Thus, how to get Magento 1.7? Usually update process is a real nightmare for e-merchants and it is no wonder as the procedure appears to be hard and
complex. You can find lots of videos and guides but they do not guarantee the successful update and accurate data transfer from your store. However, there is a safe choice. Using Cart2Cart you can perform Magento upgrade in a few steps. 1. Back up your store data. 2. Make sure the store meets requirements. Check whether: HTTP authorization is turned off; Cart2Cart IP addresses are not blocked by your firewall; PHP memory limit is at least 256 Mb or better 512 Mb. 3. Install Magento 1.7 on the server. Do not install add-ons and plugins before upgrade is completed. You can do that after the process is over. 4. Run Demo Migration. This is an important step to check whether all the data for transfer were chosen correctly. It takes from 10 to 20 minutes but appears to be really important as preparation for the Full Migration.
5. Complete Full Migration.
6. Reindex data and clear cache. Perform that with the help of admin panel. You need to do these actions to make all the results of your migration visible. 7. Take care about design. Transfer design and content to your new store. 8. Test your upgraded store. Don’t skip this point. Make sure that everything works in a proper way: create an account, sign in and make a test purchase. If it is made successfully, then upgrade to Magento 1.7 is done correctly.