Many of you might not like the previous method of Upgrade which was via connect manager. Sometimes when you have huge no. of products, then upgrading through Connect Manager, becomes a tedious task. In such a situation, we would like to suggest Magento Users to upgrade magento through FTP.
In this Tutorial, we will provide you steps to be followed while upgrading to Magento 1.7:
1- The first thing is to take the backup of your Live Database which should be up to date.
2- The next step is to take Backup of your Magento Website.
3- Now create a directory in your magento install and name it “Test” or any other name you want to use.
4- Now upload Magento 1.7 files, into newly created directory i.e. “Test”.
5- Now create a new MySQL database with new username for your Magento website.
6- Now import the database (Backed up in step 1) into this newly created database.
7- Modify the core_config_table base_urls to point to your test location, e.g. http://www.abcd.com/test/
8- In order to use new database, you need to modify app/etc/local.xml
9- Once you are done with all above steps, just run the frontend and backend of website.
Points to be considered while Upgrading
Point 1
Make sure the theme that you want to use for your Upgraded Store, is compatible with 1.7 version.
Point 2
Most of the errors occur on account of Extensions that we use in upgraded store. Reason being, there are some extensions that may not compatible with 1.7 version. So befoe upgrading, please make sure all your extensions are compatible with latest version.
Point 3
In case any extension is not compatible with latest version and that extension is very important for your store, we would suggest not to upgrade now and wait for the new version of extension that is compatible with 1.7 version.
If you follow all these steps carefully, then you can successfully upgrade your Magento Store.