We've successfully created two new production websites using Sitefinity 4.0, so now it is time for us to focus on migrating our existing production Sitefinity 3.7 websites to Sitefinity 4.0. I spent the last 2 days with the Sitefinity Migration Tool, but for our customized Sitefinity implementations there seems to be some roadblocks. I found the documentation was fine, but I had issues running the code. I was getting exceptions and database inconsistencies that render the website unusable, so I started backing up different stages to allow me to rollback and I stepped through the migration tool code line-by-line and added code to better capture errors. I found that it was best to do one entity at a time (ex. roles, then users, etc) and make sure each entity worked before going on to the next.
The screen may show some summary details, but the full details are logged in the Migration in the HTML Log File located here:
~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Logs/Migration.Log.htm
I had issues with obsolete references in my templates so they failed. Continuing without addresses this meant that all the pages were created without a template assigned to them. I tried deleting the pages, fixing the templates, then loading the pages, but that didn't work, so I deleted the templates, loaded the pages, then executed the following database command to set the page templates:
update
sf_page_data set template_id = 'some_template_GUID' where theme = 'some_theme' and template_id is null
go SELECT
SELECT
[content_id],[date_created],[last_modified],[publication_date],[template_id],[theme],[title_en],[url_name_en],[description_] from sf_page_data where theme = 'some_theme' and template_id is null
This may be obvious and probably will not be an issue for most, but realize that only the current revision of a page is migrated to Sitefinity 4.0, all older revisions from the Sitefinity 3.7 site are left behind.
It appears that multiple cultures are put in by default. I'm not ready to test out multiple cultures yet and it causes an extra dialog box to show every time you save a page, so I went to Administration - Settings - Languages and removed the extra languages for now.
One issue came when I tried to bring up the old website with the Migration Export Service page. My production website has multiple host headers, so I added the following to the bottom of <system.serviceModel>
<serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true"> </serviceHostingEnvironment>
This allows the Migration Export Service web service page to come up.
I will enter blog entries tagged with 'Migration' to record my issues and solutions.
Are you migrating from Sitefinity 3.7 to Sitefinity 4.0? How is it going? What successes have you had? How customized is your Sitefinity 3.7 site? Please share your successes and your issues by commenting in this blog!
completedSynchronously) +270
Do you have any idea what might be the problem?
RadEditor - please enable JavaScript to use the rich text editor.
I often get asked why I'm willing to journal all of my Sitefinity discoveries. People think I'm insane to give away for free what I labored over at some point.
Let me answer that in 2 parts:
Talk to us about how we can help YOU!
Keep up with our Sitefinity discoveries! Click on the RSS feed icon below or sign up for our newsletter.