Conversion and Backporting

Well the steps I'm taking now will finally upgrade some of that ancient software. A trial run through the steps should give me a decent idea of how long this will take. Reading through the install and upgrade section in the documentation of the new version does leave me a bit worried. The conversion itself seems a bit lackadaisical and requires a fair bit of human intervention. The best approach might be to go through the whole upgrade on the workstation, take very detailed notes, carefully and methodically add those extensions that I had added to the original. After that attempt is successful, a conversion for a demo version of the site on the server is the next step. Once that is satisfactory, run the conversion for the production version of the site on the server. Of course, disciplined backups, careful and appropriate use of source control as well as viable rollback plan are all absolutely necessary should things somehow go awry.