As I’m busy designing and developing my new weblog I noticed a minor Orchard version was released. Because I’m in the starting phase of the development cycle, I decided to upgrade to the latest version.

This is rather easy, as you can just download the latest sources from CodePlex, extract and copy them over the old codebase (well, I deleted the original 1.3 files and copied the 1.4 files to a ‘clean’ folder).

Upgrading the Orchard sources broke several of my new modules, so I had to fix the broken code. After resolving those issues I pressed [Ctrl]+[F5] to see if everything was still working. It wasn’t.

Starting the site, I received a 404 error, because the pages couldn’t be found. Logs weren’t very helpful, aside from telling me some queries couldn’t run correctly. Deleting the /Sites/-folder in the App_Data did help me a bit, because now it showed me the normal ‘Orchard set up new site’ form.
Because I was starting to get a bit frustrated I decided to create a new website and have the connectionstring map to my old Orchard weblog database. This didn’t work either. Now there was an error the Recipes modules couldn’t be found or instantiated.

After having spent several hours searching for a solution by myself I finally stumbled upon a post of David Hayden telling something about an UpgradeTo14 module. Apparently you need to activate a module to do a successful upgrade.

In my search for the problem I had already learned there are some issues with the blog titles not showing anymore if you didn’t had the Title module enabled while migrating. The recipes error was also something still fresh in my mind, so I decided to follow this upgrade path:

• Navigate to the admin area of your site https://localhost:30320/YourSite/Admin/
• Enable the Title module
• Enable the Recipes module
• Enable the UpgradeTo14 module
• Click on the Migrate to 1.4 link
• In the Migrate Routes tab, check all options and click Migrate
• In the Migrate Fields tab, check all options and click Migrate

As I didn’t had any other 3rd party modules installed, this all worked out like a charm. If you’ve got modules installed which aren’t compatible with 1.4, you’re probably have a problem migrating and are better off staying at 1.3 for now.

Now that I’ve got the new version installed I can’t wait to play with the Projector module, which looks really awesome. For now I’ll stick with getting my new weblog online as soon as possible, so playing around will just have to wait.