Magento upgrade failing?  Read on for 5 simple yet often overlooked tips to help take the pain out of Your Magento Community Edition upgrade.

First off,  Don’t do it unless You build Magento Sites. Seriously if you are searching for a Quick, and easy  How-To for any Magento upgrade, You my friend have already lost.

Now if Your a web developer or aspiring web developer read on to make the upgrade less painfull!

**** This info is most specific to Magento versions 1.4-1.9 , but should prove useful for almost all versions.

NOTE 1:

DO NOT UPGRADE FROM ANY VERSION that is 2 VERSIONS BEHIND WHAT YOU ARE UPGRADING TO!  Examples:

Upgrades from version 1.7 TO version 1.9 will work fine

Upgrades from version 1.6 or older TO version 1.9 will most likely fail hardcore at some point.

NOTE 2:  Make sure to put the site in maintenance mode.  This is really important if all You have is ftp access.

NOTE 3: Backup everything 3 times, You will need the backups.  At the very least you will have to manually move .htaccess contents, and basic config info from the old files to the new ones.

NOTE 4: You are doing this on a development server correct??????  Please for the love of something important to You, DO NOT DO THIS ON YOUR PRODUCTION SERVER.  Pushing Your updated Magento install to production is a whole different article!

NOTE 5:  Set Your site to use its default theme without extra code added in.  This is the single biggest time saver I have found. After the upgrade just re-enable Your custom theme.  I can’t tell You how many themes I have found that don’t work with the default .htaccess supplied with Magento. this can be frustrating when trying to access Your site after an upgrade.

NOTE 5:  Disable and .htpasswd security on your web directories. NOW RESTART APACHE! If apache uses .htpasswd security while Your doing Your Magento upgrade START OVER.  Do not try to fix it, their will be no complete record of what did or did not complete during the upgrade. You will have no way of knowing where to start fixing things

So there You go. Hopefully this info Helped.