[TYPO3-english] [Rant, long] Update 4.5.35 -> 6.2.x

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Upgrading a site to 6.2 can 
sometimes be easy and sometimes be a real challenge.

There are a few things that will help or even make the migration a lot 
easier (depending on the particular installation).

- make sure the old installation is up to date and running smoothly. 
That means no database updates when you check DB compare in the install 
tool, reference index updated, extensions up to date, core on latest 
version of the branch, nothing worrying in the sys_log, preferrably 
nothing in the deprecation log (turn it on for testing).

- check all extensions if there are versions compatible with 6.2

- use the smooth migration extension to do further checks on the 
existing extension and see what changes are necessary

- the 6.2 Install Tool has wizards to update the core records, but it 
can't do much for other extensions. The 6.2 Install Tool can check if 
extensions will crash the backend and can deactivate them to make the 
backend accessible again

- DAM isn't exactly replaced by FAL as a premeditated plan. As you 
noticed with all the mysterious automatic copies of file (the original 
idea was that if a file was used on three places the copies would at 
least ensure that these usages would stay working if the original was 
removed) the handling of files in TYPO3 needed to change. There were use 
cases for transparently handling files in remote storages so the FAL 
concept was born. At the same time DAM development stalled and soon it 
was realized that many use cases for DAM could be implemented with FAL.
There is a nice migration extension available to convert the DAM meta 
data into FAL meta data.

Maybe take a bit longer time to spread the upgrade work and ask for help 
here and there instead of trying to invent the wheel again?

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 CMS Active Contributor

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