Why should I upgrade?

C1 CMS is under continuous development and, as time passes, your old C1 CMS installation will become increasingly outdated. You may experience that new browser releases introduce problems with running the CMS Console on your old installation, web developers may be prevented from using up-to-date technology when expanding an existing site, and all the progress that is freely available in the latest C1 CMS is inaccessible to you.

When you upgrade, you are ensured the following benefits:

• You get all feature improvements that have been added since the version you are running.
• You get access to all the free and commercial feature packages.
• You get all the latest performance improvements, security improvements and bug fixes.
• You get the best possible support in the CMS Console for the most modern browsers.
• Web developers become more effective since their toolbox typically becomes expanded and improved for every C1 CMS release.

We strongly encourage you to get one of the C1 CMS Service Plans – this lets you upgrade your C1 CMS version very conveniently from within the CMS Console. This is a paid service, so you are also helping the C1 CMS project move forward, enabling us to add more and better features to our open source software.

CMS Service Plans

With any of the C1 CMS Service Plans you have access to our thoroughly tested upgrade packages. An upgrade package typically takes less than a minute to install.

To upgrade using a CMS Service Plan:

1. Go to https://cms.orckestra.com/Products/Plans and purchase one of the plans available.
2. In the CMS Console, upgrade like this:
   1. Launch the CMS Console.
   2. Go to the System perspective
   3. Expand Packages | Available Packages | Composite.Updates
   4. Click "Package Info" on the update available and click "Install".
      

General upgrade recommendations

We suggest that you – as a minimum - ensure you have a fresh backup of your website and a plan for rolling back such a backup in case something should go awry.

A very easy way to take a backup of your website is to use the Composite.Tools.XmlBasedSiteBackup add-on.

If you are upgrading across major versions, your website is mission critical or contains a lot of customizations we strongly encourage you to execute and test the upgrade in a test environment first.