CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

As I understand it, to upgrade from 1.9 to current versions we do a series of installs with the new versions.   Has anyone developed a convert where we run a routine against the old data converting to the new format and then just install the current version of the scripts?

Thanks, I'll look the wiki doc over.  Seems silly to have to install a version that we don't want in order to work our way to a current version when we are more than one version back.

Anyone try this from version 1.9 to ideally 2.2 (or whatever is the latest version).

The 2009 Colorado legislative cycle is almost over and we will be looking more seriously at "upgrading" from 1.9 to a later version (perhaps 2.3 when available, but maybe 2.2).  We have acquired space on a 2nd server so that we can test without disrupting our production system.

This brings us back to how to get from 1.9 to 2.3.  I know that most people upgrade through each of the versions and deal with the issues.   I suppose that we'll find out why not, but I confess that at the moment, I'm an export and reload advocate.   I'm sure that there lots of aspects that will make the reload harder than I think, but I remember that we started a year and a half ago completely from csv export files from our old system.

Groups are an area where there does not seem to be any export / import capability and the sql statements will probably not easily convert because I think the custom fields use a new table structure.  However, after reviewing our groups, our important groups are almost all smart groups based on custom field values.  We may have 100 to 200 smart groups by the time that we convert, but I think we could rebuild them as we go.   Also, I've noticed that smart groups seem to become incorrect sometimes and we've had to rebuild periodically anyway. 

Contacts that have been removed from the group or manually added, but after examining the CiviCRM_Group_Contact table, we have 2,400 records, but I think most of them have temporary usefulness and are mostly to identify import batch records.  We don't have unsubscribes at the present time (but they may come back), because in our mailings we have hidden the unsubscribe and only present opt out - seems to work better in our situation, because few understood the difference.

Another benefit to the export and reload approach is that we should be able to prune some of the activity files - see discussion here - http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3330.0.html

The export / import approach may be somewhat like a clean install and since we are doing on a test server, we can abandon and begin the upgrade process if we need to. 

My reason for posting this Upgrade vs. Convert is to see if others have examined this issue and hopefully learn the considerations that you have found.

Thank you.