Greetings:
We are in the process of upgrading from our current bv5 sp2 to bv5 sp4. We decided that the approach to take is create a separate development website and database. Our server is being hosted by a hosting company and we asked them to make a copy (restore) of the production SQL Server database and also copy all of our production files to the developement website. This is where we are at now.


I am not sure exactly how to upgrade the development website with the BV5 sp4 remotely. I downloaded the full version of BV5 SP4 and ran Create New Store -> Upgrade 5.x Store . It prompts for the location of the website which in our case is a remote location (http://www.xxxxx.com). Is the procedure to run the upgrade to a dummy directory and ftp all the files to the remote site? will we be running any SQL scripts to upgrade the database after the copy over?



Thanks for your help.

Nolax

We always do manual upgrades. To do this you run a series of SQL scripts in sequence from the next version newer than the one you have to the current one (i.e. SP3, SP3.1, SP3.2, SP4). The scripts are located in the /BVAdmin/BVSql folder. Once you've done that you need to push up the new web files. If you have not made any changes to your site beyond the theme folder, you should be able to overwrite all of the files minus the Web.config. Otherwise you will need to merge your site files with the new site files using a comparison tool like Beyond Compare or Araxis Merge. Hope this helps!

Nolax,

Yes. An easier way to handle step #2 is to just copy the files from where they are installed on your computer (that's where the installer copies from). Assuming you didn't change any paths when you installed BV on your system, it should be: \Program Files\BV Software\Bvc 5.4\src\www

Greetings Aaron:

As I promised, I will update this thread just to share our experience with any members that are interested. The dev/test site is fully functional and mirrors the production site. We are able to to do a lot of product and feature testing in the dev environment. Now that we are quite comfortable with how the upgrade affects our current environment, we decided that we will apply the upgrade to the production box and keep the dev enironment as it is. The other approach we have considered was do all the upgrade on the dev environment and when we we are ready to go, have our registered DNS point to the test environment (which will be henceforth the production environment).

Since the release of the SP5 is expected at anytime, we decided to wait until the release before we upgrade.

An issueswe notice with SP4 which are not issues in SP3

- during the checkout process, when keying the shipping address, when you get to the "State", the screen updates and regardless of whether the "Same as Shipping Address" is check, it will require you to rekey in all the billing information.