Sitefinity Migration from 3.7 to 4.4 My Experience

Jared Johnson, 11 March 2012

The migration tool is quite effective at converting all the pages and templates and then migrating all the content modules such as events and blogs. It however could not deal with an image library that contained over 2000 images, until it was broken up into smaller pieces.

On the pages themselves the inbuilt css on the Sitefinity controls has higher priority than it did in 3.7, causing a lot of css errors that need to be fixed. There were also some layout issues caused by the generic content blocks adding a <br> tag at the bottom, this can be fixed by overriding the template for the content block as in this thread. Some of the pages while looking fine when navigated to, when edited in Sitefinity they somehow broke the editing pane, some elements were sitting above the editing menu, and none of the editing buttons would work, these I had to recreate.

One disappointing thing about Sitefinity 4 is the few controls that have been removed compared to 3.7, in my case the Breadcrumb and the events calendar. The breadcrumb however is fairly easy to recreate, detailed here. Another is how much messier the code generated by Sitefinity is, in particular the massive JavaScript wall of doom.