My upgrade journey

I don't know if this is allowed but this is my website upgrade journey, might help a few doing the same.

Burntstuff has been operating now for just over eight years, how time flies, with the majority of sales taking place through my website www.burntstuff.com. When I first set the site up back in late 2014, I spent a lot of time looking at different e-commerce platforms to see what I liked the best, these included Shopify, Woocommerce and a few others. I even set up some test shops to see how the various platforms worked and looked. Some sites were self-hosted and others hosted in the cloud, where you pay either a monthly fee or a commission on each sale, I wasn’t keen on paying monthly fees or commission, so I eventually settled on a platform called Opencart, you install it onto your own hosted server, so the only initial costs for running the site are your hosting fees. For my hosting, I use a small UK based company called invisional.co.uk whose fees are very reasonable, but more importantly their support is exceptional and you usually deal with the same person.

At the time the latest version of Opencart was 2.0.1.1 and this was what I installed. The look and functions of the Opencart platform are pretty basic and to change the look and add features you need to install themes (to change the look) and extensions (to add features), some of these are free but most you have to pay for. I added a theme called Journal2, this allowed me to change the look of the site to exactly how I wanted it, Journal2 also had things like popups, banners and slide shows. Whilst making the site look (in my opinion) great, Journal2 was a very large piece of software and could make the site run slow, any issues were hard to sort out and the support wasn’t great. I also added some other extensions, mostly backend, which helped me run the site more efficiently.

Over the years Opencart kept upgrading its platform, moving to Version 3 in 2017 and Version 4 in 2022, but I kept with Version 2.0.1.1 as I was a little scared of the upgrade process and was worried about losing my data moving from the old platform to the new one.

Earlier in 2023, for some reason the extension that took PayPal and Credit Card Statements stopped working as it should, so I had to revert back to a simpler PayPal Extension and stop taking Credit Card Payments directly on the site, PayPal themselves noticed this and got in touch, they tried to help but couldn’t get to the bottom of the problem. Then one day the whole site went off line and just wouldn’t work. I ended up using a UK based company to get it going again, this was a costly exercise and left me worried that the site might go down again.

A month or so ago I decided it was time to bite the bullet and have the site moved to the latest most stable version of Opencart, so I went for Version 3.0.3.9 rather than the newer Version 4.x. To carry out the update and set everything up I could employ a company to do it for me, but the cost can run into the thousands, something I don’t really want to pay, if I could do most of the work myself. After a bit of Googling I found a website called litextension.com and they provide an automated service to transfer all your websites data from one platform to another. Something that I liked about using this service was they had someone available on chat 24 hours a day who could answer my queries. The transfer isn’t a free service, it ended up costing me around £200.00 with the extras I added. To start the process, I downloaded Opencart 3.0.03.9 and installed it in a sub directory called /shop2 on my hosting platform. What I should have done next is set some basic stuff up in settings, such as weight and measurement types and a few other things, not doing this would cause an issue for me later. Litextension.com allows you to carry out a test upgrade first, just transferring a small amount of data across to the new platform I performed this and everything seemed to go well, I could see the small number of products, images, customers and orders that it transferred across, so I ran the full install and left it to get on with it, over the next few hours, thousands of orders and customers, plus a couple of hundred products along with all their images and options were copied over the new platform.

As with all these things not everything goes as smooth as you want it, the issues were mainly small, around a dozen images were missing, so I manually copied these over from the old platform to the new most other things looked okay.

The next stage was to reinstall the various extensions I had on the old platform to the new, One important extension I use tries to calculate as fairly as possible the shipping cost depending on the size and weight of the items being posted and their destination. When I first set this up a few years back, I spent quite a lot of time inputting all the different postal zones, rates and options (such as standard post or tracked). Luckily the extension allows you to export its data, so it was a simple case of exporting the data from the old website and importing it into the new one and everything looked good. I thought I would check to see if things were working correctly by putting a couple of items in the cart and seeing if the postage was calculated correctly. Unfortunately, the site kept saying no postage options available. After a little digging I found that all the products had their weights shown in kilograms and sizes in meters where they should have been in grams and millimeters. So an item that should have been showing as weighing 15 grams was now 15 kilograms. The problem went back to when I first installed the software and I failed to set the weights and Sizes as grams and millimeters in the settings. I had to spend a couple of hours manually changing each product back to grams and mm.

Most other extensions I use installed fine. One I use often is called Mass Option Update. A lot of my iems use the same options for Leather Colour Choice, so if I add a new leather colour, or if one goes out of stock, over a hundred products need to be updated. To do this manually would take hours, but the Mass Option Update allows you do it in seconds. I downloaded the latest version of the extension which should have been compatible with the version of Opencart I was now setting up, whilst it installed okay on running the extension there were a couple of issues which prevents me from using it, I’ve been in touch with the Developer and hopefully these problems will be resolved. After a bit more searching I managed to find an extension that does a similar job and has a much less cluttered interface so I have installed that and its working well.

The default theme that comes with Opencart is a little plain it has a white background and blue buttons, a little boring in my opinion, I didn’t want to install a heavy duty theme such as Journal again and a lot of the themes I looked at didn’t give me the look I was after or added features I didn’t want. I eventually found something called Zen Live Preview Editor (https://zengrafic.com/en/templates_estensioni_opencart) which allows you to design your own theme, change the colour of the background and buttons, etc. and see the changes live as you make them. The developer was also very quick to respond to a few issues I had. I’ve kept the look of the site pretty simple, this may evolve over the next few months, but nothing too radical.

One extension I couldn’t install due to it not being available for this version of Opencart, would allow customers to add some extra text to the back of a product, they would click on this option and a text box would appear and for an extra 50p text could be lasered onto the items back. The only extension I could find that did something similar charges by the letter, so I had to come up with a fair price per letter and I settled on 7p a letter, hopefully I won’t get too many really short names or customers complaining their really long name is costing too much!

As its Christmas and the workshop will be closed over the Christmas period as I will be visiting family in the UK, I put the old still working and taking orders site into maintenance mode, popped up a Closed for Christmas Sign on the website to let customers know we were taking a break. I then transferred using litextension.com the latest orders and customers from the old to the new site. The original web shop runs in a sub directory called burntstuff.com/shop so I renamed this sub directory to something else and renamed the directory that the new version was in to /shop. I had to change the links in some of the config files. The site seems to be working and is due to go live in the next few days.

It’s been quite a learning experience transferring everything over, just a few mishaps, hopefully if I upgrade again in the future it won’t be as daunting next time.

julianashcroft wrote: ↑

Sun Dec 24, 2023 9:41 pm

The transfer isn’t a free service, it ended up costing me around £200.00 with the extras I added

lol, only to transfer data?

It was an even cheaper solution....50$ for example

I looked at cheaper options, even sent an enquiry to one company, but they took ages to reply and their answers weren't very encouraging. The company I used answered my queries by way of a chat feature within minutes. The process was pretty pain free too.