Prestashop migration / upgrade

[Wiz_KeeD]

I have seen many posts and many topics all of which had just a bit of the information wanted so here's the thing:

I have an old version of prestashop (Version 1.3.0.10 to be exact) and i wish to transfer all the products and category data to the new version.

What i am aiming is to save just the load of work i've done before on the products (the countless product images, description, meta information, category names) and all that, the themes and other settings are irrelevant.

I have tried updating to the latest version and it ended up not working on the standard 1.4 theme.

Long story made short, how can i transfer all products + products information + categories into a fresh version of 1.4 so i can build up from there the modules, the theme, settings and such.

I have also thought about exporting the tables that are relevant to the product and category information, but i thought that while risking the omittance of some relevant tables, these might also differ in presta 1.4.So that was also a solution i rather not take and consult the forum uphand.

Thank you!

[uddhava]

From my experience with upgrading (from 1.3.1.1 to 1.4.2) you better wait until at least 1.4.3 or something like that. When i upgraded my live site all the categories were duplicated in the database.. ouch. I think it has been fixed on the svn, but i cant find it in the Forge at the moment. Secondly upgrading is further a pain because 1) template is not compatible, 2) all your extra modules get disabled and might not be compatible.
But at least all the products, images, orders, customers etc etc info is still there. So for that it is 'worth' upgrading. But for the theme's problems and modules it might not be.

Just be prepared to spend a lot of work cleaning up the mess. And since there will be a lot of extra work this cannot be done on your live server without serious downtime.