Deployment plans, wanna give me advice?

[SteveHiner]

I'm currently upgrading a 7.0.6 site to Gold. I installed a backup of the production database on my laptop, installed Gold and upgraded the database. Now I'm customizing the site to add all the changes we made to the original 7.0 version.

My plan for rolling out to production is to:

• close the store on the production host
• backup the database
• install db locally and upgrade it
• migrate db based configuration from test db to the upgraded db
• verify the store runs locally
• backup local database and restore to server under new name
• update the database configuration in the local database.config file
• set store to demo mode so it won't be particular about the URL
• copy all the sites files up to the web host
• license the site for the production url

What have I missed?

One thing I would like to know is which tables in the database store configuration information. There are some obvious ones like ac_StoreSettings and ac_Webpages but I'm wondering what other tables likely hold configuration. I'm really looking for the kinds of things that get set to change the store look and feel since that's most of what I'm doing. It appears that some of the things that used to be in scriptlets are now in ac_Webpages. Any configuration that is already done in the db in 7.0 I don't need to worry about, it really the configuration that won't already be in my 7.0 to Gold upgraded db that I'm worried about missing.

[AbleMods]

Don't forget to back up the Able encryption key(s) before you move the database. Otherwise you'll lose payment and shipping gateway setups.

[SteveHiner]

Thanks Joe, I have made a note to do that before the upgrade. In fact, maybe I'll just do it now to be sure.

[jmestep]

If you will be using email templates from your 706 site, don't forget to change the code for displaying things like order total and price- the ToString("ulc") stuff.
Moving the scriplet code into the database and setting your layout configurations need to be done immediately after upgrade, which you have mentioned. I usually have to reset the store theme also.
If you are using the email templates from the old site, you need to change the way dollar amounts are displayed. (the .ToString("ulc" to something like $helper.LSCurrencyFormat($orderItem.Price,"ulc")) stuff.
If you have new file system webpages in the old site, you can put them into the old site database, make them private, re-name the urls (I put an "x" in front of them), then fix the names and make them public right after the upgrade.
Be sure to run the scripts from Able's help site that clean up anonymous user stuff in the old site database.