So you’re thinking about an upgrade?

I’ve been involved in a few discussions about the scope of projects to upgrade existing Sitecore instances in the last few weeks, and quite a lot of that discussion has focused around the “development environment” aspects of the upgrade work. So I thought I would write down some of the things that have come up in my conversations. This isn’t supposed to be a “how-to” guide, or a complete list of everything you need to worry about. But hopefully this post will provoke thought and discussions on some important topics around what might need to change – especially if you’ve not done an upgrade before…

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Read those release notes…

It’s easy to get distracted by all the shiny big features that get deployed in new releases of Sitecore, but every so often a little gem slips past almost without comment. Except in the release notes…

Buckets are more important than you thought…

Every so often you come across a small config change which does stuff you just did not expect. I hit an issue around this recently, which I figured I should document to try and prevent anyone else getting to spend time with diff, scratching their head for as long as I did…

How to shoot yourself in the foot with a config patch…

Sitecore config patches are great, right? We (should) all be using them to ensure that our changes in configuration don’t get stomped on when we upgrade, or install new modules. But like any bit of technology, they can sometimes cause problems. Here’s an example of one I saw recently, in the hope it can save others from similar issues: