Umbraco Tales, Part 1
Recently (For much of 2022) My team and I have been working on a project for a client to migrate/upgrade their site from Umbraco 7 to 9.
As anyone who has worked with anything besides WordPress probably already painfully know that upgrading between any major versions in other CMS platforms is not a one click journey.
This much is true for Umbraco--the CMS our client uses and prefers to remain on.
First, We needed to migrate the database over. But in order to do that, we needed to make it compatible for Umbraco 8 before going from 8 => 9. And in order to do that, we needed to scrub a lot of tables that according to the migration instructions--were no longer compatible.
After several weeks of discovery and attempts to prep the database for it to be processed by the Umbraco 8 installation-- the database was ready. I don't know, to be honest, this was my first time really doing this. Like most projects I work on here at my current job as a Project Coordinator that 'wears many hats', Everyday is a new day to learn and I burned through every knowledge base, forums, and resource I could to learn and try and fail and try again. Eventually, I got it right, and the upgrade could move forward.
After the database was processed by the migrator, it booted. But of course, as expected, nothing rendered. That was nexxt part.
My teammate and I was hoping for an easy retrofit. But because it was on a new framework (ASP.NET/DOTNET5) so many of the dependencies that the site was orignally built with was either deprecicated and many others were not replaced. The documentation doesn't provide the list of compatible dependencies for us to update to, so we hit another roadblock.
After much attempts from the team and I to figure it out, I made the call to stop pursuing a way to retrofit the site as we were making zero progress and we should just rebuild it.
After the client approved, thus began an 8 month project divided into 16 sprints.
In addition to the Framework upgrade, we were also upgrading their CSS framework as well. Yes, I like to make things harder for myself.
I hope to be documenting some cool things that I've learn along the way and share some of the features we've discovered that have improved since Umbraco 7.