finally I did it: I managed the "migration" from 5.1.0 to 5.2.2.
As some of you might now the change to 5.2. is quite a major change for liferay.
Funnily the final reason for me to migrate was a quite small change: In 5.2.2. finally Blog-Entries get a HTML Title and a friendly URL. This is quite important from an SEO perspective.
(By the way: Big thanks to the liferay community - I triggered this feature by myself by writing a forum post about it - and it has been implemented quite quickly afterwards!)
Why do I write "Migration" in quotationmarks?
After some bad experiences while trying to migrate from 4.3.5 to 5.1.0 (over 4.4.2) I came up with a new "migration" strategy: I install a fresh new bundle and make the necessary changes in the file system. This seems to work with much less problems to me.
Here are the general steps I use to follow:
Step 1: The new installation
- point to database (+ potentially install driver) - now in portal-ext.properties
- config mail service - now in portal-ext.properties
- configure the start script (for tomcat: setenv.sh)
Step 2: Do the post installation steps
- Transport additional webcontent (In my case I had some html and applets in a folder. This needs to go into the ROOT folder)
- Finalize the portal-ext.properties file (Normally you have to take everything that is in the _legacy_ properties provided by liferay. This goes especially for authorizations - you can't login if you are migration from an old version due to some algorithm changes)
- (optional) In my case I have to change the port to 9080 - so I have to modify the web.xml file of tomcat
- provide "authentication"files for google or yahoo webmastertools
Said and done. :)
No honestly: Of course it cost my about two days again - but this time especially due to some tomcat specific things I wasn't used to - and some changes in 5.2.2.
But I will describe this in the next post.
