Hello, I am a new user to opencart. A few weeks ago we started a test opencart site to explore the possibilities of moving from a zencart site (done by a previous employee) to opencart. There is a lot to like about opencart! Unfortunately the upgrade from 2020 that was only a few weeks old, to 2031 was not as smooth as we had hoped and my managers are now talking about scrapping the project and trying something with a more stable code base that doesn't change every month.
I thought I would share my thoughts on the process and see if my inexperience with opencart has led me to miss something.
1) changelog.md lists changes and git hub addresses, but there is no specific changed file list like zencart includes with its updates. When updating a live site we previously found these lists very useful in tracking down why our site broke after an upgrade.
2) In the upgrade.txt instructions, it talks briefly about creating an upgrade patch.
If you are up to date with the last recent version and want to find just the new files that have changed since the last version, you can follow this guide to create a smaller changes-only patch. But for most, the full opencart zip will suffice.
I could not find the "guide" it referred to and ended up following the instructions as written. That promptly broke our template and we had to rebuild the site from a backup, it works now. Not knowing which specific files where changed in the upgrade I am not sure if some of the files I used in repairing the site might have undone any upgrades.
So right now we are unsure on pursuing the opencart store further because of the constantly changing code and having to reconstruct a site after what was suppose to be a minor upgrade.