Karma Computing

Magento 2 Enterprise Upgrade How To

Christopher Simpson -

This article is for both developers and business decision makers. Migrating and upgrading from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is a big task but planned well; it can go smoothly. Bare in mind that the upgrade from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is a completly new approach. It's not too dissimilar to the upgrade of another large OpenSource project, Drupal, which had a similar leap forward between version 7 and 8. In short, they rearchitected their entire offering for the benefit of future stability.

Should I upgrade to Magento 2

Yes.

Magento 2 brings it up to date with other frameworks, without this update Magento was starting to lag behind whilst the PHP community adopted more robust tried and tested patterns such as model-view-controller (MVP), and Composer for managing dependencies.

More importantly you can build an upgrade path into your development strategy. The task is to plan data migration, rollback incase of failure, and understanding how to remodel your current Magento install to the newer version. This is no different from switching to another ecommerce platform. Things to think long and hard about:

  • How will I migrate my data?
  • Have I dedicated enough time to Magento data migration?
  • How easily can I roll back to an earlier version if I need to?

Upgrading to Magento 2 From a business perspective

  • You'll benefit from future upgrades taking less time

Magento 2 takes a more modular approach to its design, this means developers can reason about their code in smaller discrete units without impacting other areas of code. This doesn't mean you can skip change management planning! It only justifies the expense.

  • Take account of your assets
    • Which addons does your Magento 1 site have installed? List them
    • What is the size of your customer and orders database?
  • Does your Magento 1 site connect to other services?
    • Accountancy: If you're sending transactions to another system, this needs to be planned for
    • Backup: How does this currently operate, how will it change
  • Skills development
    • Does your internal team have the neccessery understanding of Magento 2? MageTraining offer Magento training for your staff. Consider training staff before you upgrade
    • Onsite technical staf: Allow time for your tech team to get familiar, Magento 2 is a significantly different beast to Magento 1. Invest in retraining, revisiting newer versions of PHP so that debugging is not guesswork.

Where can I get support for Magento 2?

Mangento 2 is still new in the enterprise world, meaning developers are (even a few years afer realase) still learning the new version themelves. There is no such thing as "knowing Magento", just a collection of experiences which they can relate to the way your organisation uses it.

Dedicate adequate time to do requirements analysis, as you may find some of the features you used to buy addons for are now part of the Magento 2 core so your development team will need to account for that.