Upgrading to CMS 6 RC1

EPiServer CMS 6 RC1 supports upgrading from EPiServer CMS 5 R2, we have tested a couple of internal customers like EPiServer World and external customers that donated a copy of their site to us.

The upgrade process does a few notable things:

• XForms and Property Settings will be migrated to the new data store DDS, a site with 70,000 posts took about 20 minutes to migrate.
• Some configuration will move to 2 new files, episerver.config and EPiServerFramework.config.
• A new folder Licenses will be created to support the license management in admin (but the old License.config will remain until you make changes in license UI)
• The path to Edit mode will change to accommodate OnlineCenter that will host multiple applications going forward, you can find the URL from the right-click menu as usual.

Known issues:

• The XForm migration fails if you have a form with duplicate fields since that is not allowed (and was not allowed in the UI in CMS 5 either). You can rerun the migration of data using the “Migrate data..” in Deployment Center if it fails and you need to correct this (the migration is done automatically when you upgrade). We have only found 1 customer so far that had this problem.

Things you need to know about an upgraded site:

• You need a new license file for CMS 6, head over to the license site.
• An upgraded site will use the old editor for compatibility reasons, if you want the new editor just search for “LegacyPropertyXhtmlStringControl” in web.config and remove those lines.
• The new editor drops support for property of type “Long string”, you must use “XHTML string”. A long string is now only, eh, a long string.
• You may get “Access to the path 'z:\site\8f7-onav.newcfg' is denied” when browsing the site for the first time. The service account for IIS must be able to resave configuration changes to update the IIS->Site setting on the first initialization. We will improve this error message before the release.
• CMS 6 is close to 100% binary compatible with CMS 5 R2 so most often you don’t need to recompile any code.
• CMS 6 RC1 is not binary compatible with CTP2, a lot happened up to RC1 (that we will blog more about).
• You will be able to upgrade from RC1 to the release.

Reporting problems:

• Don’t wait or think that someone else will find your problem, please report it ASAP in the forums so we can have a look at it.

If you want to help us to make this release rocking stable, please upgrade some of your sites as well. That way, if you find any issues in your environment, we can have them fixed and ready for you when we ship the release.

Merry Christmas.