Recommended Upgrade Methods for AC?

[MartinZ]

We have a production 7.0.0 system that we want to upgrade to 7.0.3 with customizations to the CommerceBuilding DLL to resolve some shipping irregularities. Aside from the recommended guidelines for upgrading AC provided by Able Solutions, does anyone have alternate methods you've used to upgrade AC? What works? What doesn't? Pro's/Con's? I'm interested to see what other AC users have done to upgrade their systems when customizations have taken place. I'm documenting some upgrade options for our team and want to make sure we make the best choice possible. Thanks.

[joebeazelman]

I would recommend using some kind of version control software. There's a lot of them including Visual Source Safe, Subversion and CVS. Using version control makes handling changes much easier to manage. You can merge changes and easily roll them back to a previous date. I've found it to be very useful; it can rollback out of a bad situation where a change causes the site to stop working.

[MartinZ]

Ah, yes. I think that's part of the standard software development process. I am interested in seeing the transition from DEVELOPMENT to STAGING to PRODUCTION. We had a recommendation to copy our Production code/DB to a Development system where the necessary changes would be implemented and tested. We'd then follow a few other testing steps, ultimately resulting in copying the updated code/DB back over the production site. Sounds involved. If there are any Best Practices for these types of things, I'd appreciate any information or links on the subject

In any case, I want to have as much information regarding the many areas of upgrading AC.

[mazhar]

Read this thread about how to upgrade heavily modded sites
viewtopic.php?f=47&t=10082