Keep your store up-to-date and secure!

Keeping an online store such as Zencart up to date is very important. With each release comes more fixes, better performance and of course #1 is your stores SECURITY!! After all, you would hate to find your website online one day and hacked and lost the next!

 

How do JSWeb perform Zen Cart upgrades?

When JSWeb upgrades a Zen Cart store, we do it in as safe a way as possible, and that means we make a complete clone of both store and database and carry out the upgrade on that, allowing the live store to continue to trade whilst the work is carried out.

We usually upgrade the cloned database and, assuming all is well, immediately update the live store database. However, if you are a Paypal user, we can't do that as the Paypal changes will completely break your cart. We therefore have to leave it until the end of the process which unfortunately means we have to put your site down for up to a couple of hours whilst we merge the relevant product and customer details from the old to the new.

The files need to be compared against the originals of your current version to establish what changes were made (this has to happen regardless of who built the site) and then merge any of those changes into the new files. Quite often, 3rd party modules/add-ons will need to be re-installed with their current versions.

The amount of time taken depends on how much customisation has been done to the site.

If you wish to underake this yourself, the usual procedure is shown

• 1. Make a clone of the existing live site and place it in a directory on the server called NEWSTORE
• 2. Make a copy of the existing database.
• 3. Make a new database and insert the old data
• 4. Update the database on the NEW database
• 5. If all goes smoothly - and if you do NOT use Paypal - do a database upgrade on the old (live) store (this ensures that when it comes to merging later, both databases have the same structure). If you ARE a Paypal user, you will have to leave this until the end.
• 6. Carry out all work on the new store in NEWSTORE directory (including file upgrades to new version and re-installation of 3rd party modules)
• 7. Compare and, if necessary, merge both databases and import the result to NEW database *
• 8. Check the old store and the new store for last minute customers. If there are, do another database merge.*
• 9. If none, switch the old store to maintenance.
• 10. Move all old store files to a new directory called OLDSTORE.
• 11. COPY all files from NEWSTORE to store root.
• 12.Store will immediately be live, as the maintenance switch is in the old database.*

* Steps 7 & 8 may not always be necessary as circumstances may allow the original database to still be used, in which case you would need to check that the new configure.php files point to the right database and Step 12 becomes "Switch store out of maintenance"

but if this looks rather daunting, then the JSWeb Zen Cart development team are here to help.

Please contact us for a Free quote (please tell us what version of ZenCart you currently have and list any modules/customisations that you know you have had done).

JSWeb are here to help
Feel free to contact a member of the JSWeb team who will be able to provide support or a FREE quote for required work to get your site running perfectly - Contact Us