Last week Telligent released the first big update to Graffiti CMS, and over the weekend I spent some time upgrading the site. To help others, here's some thoughts on the upgrade...
- The instructions say to just copy the new files over the existing ones. One thing to remember to do first is to delete all of the existing content from the upgrade files. This could be fixed one of 2 ways - provide an upgrade download that contains no content and is specifically tailored to upgraders, or take advantage of IIS7 and do away with the need to have folders and pages for the content altogether! I would love to see the later.
- Upgrading VistaDB is a bit strange. You have to 'migrate' the existing database to a whole new file - there's no in-place upgrade! The migration tool is pretty cool - I also took advantage of moving from SQL Server to VistaDB on this upgrade - but it seems like it could do so much more! How slick would it be to just point a tool at your database and have it upgrade? No more messing with SQL scripts!
- Once I upgraded, I experienced a strange issue where I kept getting logged out. Not sure if this was due to high load on my hosting provider's server, or a result of changing to VistaDB, but it seemed like the process was continuously getting recycled every few clicks. I added a machine key to the web.config file and the issue went away - at least on the surface. There were no errors in the Graffiti event logs.
Overall, it wasn't that bad. I'd really like to see a handler for IIS7 so that the content folders and pages aren't necessary. Also, the configuration overrides from Community Server would be nice so I don't have to diff the old and new web.config files on each upgrade.
Congratulations on the release, Telligent!
