ExpressionEngine and it’s Upgradation Story — ZealousWeb

The lucrative digital landscape is a volatile arena within which are various agencies responding to “Jab-Cross-Hook-Cut” in an attempt to knock down the other. While they endlessly try to one-up their competition, they also try to focus on growing their business by making their digital presence grandiose. Ironically, the only way to grow is to speed ahead than your counter-part and perform every task in a much efficient manner than them.

Try tracing the timeline of open source content management as a concomitant of digital transformation, and you’ll find it too young to conquer the market and establish its monopoly, puts things into perspective for a lot of millennials and the pre-millennials. As gizmo freaks and tech-geeks, we can’t be out of the loop of current happenings and upgradations in our field of interest. One such paradigm-shifting change occurred in the avenue of CMS (Content Management System) when the makers of ExpressionEngine, EllisLab, decided to revoke the “Please Pay” sign before the “Download Now” button.

ExpressionEngine is one of the many contributors to the content management genre and holds a license under a permissive Apache 2.0 software license. Since the advent of digital space, agencies have worked towards creating robust cyberspace that compliments their operations. ExpressionEngine has been a valuable addition to the community. Its recent announcement about adopting the FOSS model has created quite a buzz within the fraternity, and this stir has consequentially augmented the interests of various others.

Since the open-source announcement, there has been a sudden boom in the usage of ExpressionEngine. For some, it may be a new concept that may have recently surfaced and may be very engaging. And like any new concept, ExpressionEngine too needs an expert to read its every little detail.

To study, even the little details of a platform such as ExpressionEngine would mean to find out, in-depth, about its most essential process, i.e., Upgradation. Since its usage has, only recently, increased; it has become almost imperative to understand and apply the process of up-gradation with utmost sincerity.

Upgradation of versions of ExpressionEngine may be considered tedious by those who aren’t fully aware of the process. The entire exercise could be divided into two parts, depending on the current version of your website. If it is functioning on the very first version of ExpressionEngine, then it is advisable to redesign it completely than upgrading it to the latest version.

Many may recommend redesigning because the cost of upgrading the site would be equal to or more than redesigning it. Also, the add-ons required in the first version may be obsolete in the second version, which makes it difficult to update them.

When you upgrade any version of ExpressionEngine, you will also have to update the add-on’s used along with the current version to complete the up-gradation process.

If a website functions in version 2 or above, then the up-gradation process would be something like this:

• If the website is functioning in version 2, we need to upgrade it to the latest version within 2, i.e., 2.11.9. Further, we have to then upgrade it to the latest version within 3, i.e., 3.5.17.
• Once we’ve reached 3.5.17, we then have to update the add-ons associated with the site. If any add-on is incompatible with the upgraded version, then we have to manually upgrade that add-on to make it compatible.
• After the updation of the add-ons, we move on to upgrading the version to the latest of 4, i.e., 4.3.8. From here, we can then move on to upgrading ExpressionEngine to the current latest version.
• Before starting the process of up-gradation, you must make a copy of the entire website and the database in anticipation of any contingency during the process. It may so happen that during up-gradation, you might encounter some error which may hamper the up-gradation process; for this reason backing up your work may prove beneficial.

If you feel that the above process is tedious and you may not be able to spare the time or expertise for the same, ZealousWeb Technologies is here to ward off your troubles. We are an end-to-end development solutions agency and will walk with you in your journey of digital transformation from conception to fruition.

Feel free to come to us with your up-gradation queries, and we shall provide you with our most efficient ExpressionEngine Solutions!

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com on September 23, 2019.