Are you planning for your site’s Liferay DXP 7.4 upgrade?
It’s a Yes!
If you’ve upgraded from a prior version of Liferay, you may know that the Liferay DXP 7.4 upgrade could be a time-consuming task. The customers either need to upgrade from 6.x to 7.4 or from 7.x to 7.4 versions. For both of these upgrades, the processing and update strategies are different. So, to not make you confused, we will explain them one by one in this blog.
For the resource-intensive process that the Liferay DXP 7.4 upgrade is, the main thing relies on the easier process of upgrading only. In Liferay 7.1, features made things easier for the users to have in their Liferay-based web interface. Customers who want an upgrade from 6.x to 7.4 can simply witness changes in the process.
Keep reading!
Table of Contents
General things to consider for Liferay DXP 7.4 Upgrade
Here are some general questions you need to think about for the Liferay DXP 7.4 upgrade. For example, the very first and most important one is: What would be the upgrade process for Liferay 7.4?
Upgrades for Liferay 7.4 can be done in two ways: via direct code upgrade from the older version to the newer version. and another is the database upgrade, which will follow the hierarchy for the first to latest version of Liferay DXP 7.
How to upgrade Liferay 6.x to 7.4?
So, if you want to upgrade your Liferay 6.2 site to Liferay 7.4, then you will first have to upgrade from Liferay DXP 6.2 to Liferay DXP 7, and then to Liferay 7.1 >> 7.2 >> 7.3 >> 7.4 (whichever version you’re looking for!)
So this is how the process works. You just must be curious about the time frame, as the database upgrade will be taking more time to get completed.
Following this, you can think about the existing automation-based features of your current Liferay version. Whenever doing any upgrade, you must pay attention to the technical debt-related issues, as they are very important and must be easily accessible for your customers.
The digital experience is something that many users have picked up from digital services. You must provide your customers with an enjoyable customer experience while surfing through your site. The absence of this may bring you less traffic, resulting in even fewer leads and target business results!
None of the businesses would ever want to face things like that, right?
How to upgrade to Liferay DXP 7.4?
Upgrading Liferay 6.x to Liferay 7.4 version
Here we will let you know how you can upgrade your existing Liferay 6.x site to Liferay DXP 7.4. Basically, for this kind of upgrade, it is done by first upgrading the 6.x Liferay version to Liferay DXP version 7. after this, you can directly upgrade the existing Liferay DXP version 7 to 7.4
For upgrading, there are three basics that need to be changed, as per the Liferay version. Since the databases of the 6.x and 7.x versions are different, developers prefer to rewrite the code to avoid complexities, glitches, bugs/errors/code failures. Hence, the custom redesign of the code is done in the WAR format. The upgrade involves many automation-based processes so that the changed features could be more accessible and accurate to the needs of the target user.
The database, modules, and configuration are changed and modified simultaneously, based on Liferay version 7 and later ones. Remember that Liferay 6.x is a plugin platform and Liferay 7.x is a module platform. So to upgrade the Liferay plugins, it is required to upgrade them to DXP 7.0 without converting them to modules. As per Liferay, it is done by first migrating the plugins to compatible WAR-based applications. And from there, it’s now easier to convert these plugins into modular form as per the newest Liferay version 7.x standards.
Upgrading Liferay 7.x to Liferay 7.4 version
Upgrading from an existing Liferay 7.x version to Liferay 7.4 is way easier. As there would not be major changes in the database, they would stay the same. The modules will also work on the same process, just with the new enhanced features, according to the update. The time limit will also be shorter as compared to the 6.x version, as only the configuration part will need to be taken care of. You can directly upgrade the existing Liferay 7.x version to Liferay 7.4.
Improving the Liferay DXP 7.4 upgrade performance
Basically, the upgradation is based on these following aspects (From Liferay 6.x to Liferay 7.x)
- Updating project metadata is related to the database.
- Updating CSS is the coding changes and modifications based on the newer version.
- Updating theme templates is related to the themes that will be used in the new version.
- Updating resource importer configuration and content relates to the coding, testing configuration, and content representation in the site’s new version.
Applying Lexicon design patterns is related to the overall implementation and the design of the web interface of the web portal based on the current version.
Improving upgrade performance means simply applying tactics to decrease the time limit that may be taken to upgrade. Once the process is started, the developers test for the presence of the environment in the Liferay version. There could be many environments as per the requirement. The ones mentioned here are as follows:
- dev: developer environment
- QA: testing environment
- UAT/Pre-prod (production): Business user testing
- Prod (production): Live site processing
This digital era is all about mobile-first web portals; hence, you should take a look at the Liferay 7.4 features specially designed for upgrading your web portal to become super cell-friendly. for upgrading, thus you may think about replacing the SPA (Single Page Application) framework with React, Angular, etc. so that your brand’s web portal could be highly responsive for the customers. Liferay DXP 7.4 Upgrade Services!
Along with this, the upgrade process also requires data pruning, data tuning and enabling batch insert for complete the improvements.
Conclusion
Once you’ve completed the above-mentioned tasks, you can consider the overall Liferay upgrade process complete. One thing you must keep in mind while planning your Liferay DXP 7.4 upgrade is to undo any upgrade-specific tuning. Also, make sure to perform the small, preliminary tasks that are required for the upgrade to start. Basically, these are the things that come before the upgrade of the data.
We think that now you’re pretty much familiar with the upgraded components!
Thanks for reading the blog.
