Hi!
I’m working on a theme upgrade and saw a note in the Hitchhiker Training saying “if you’re on a legacy theme (aka an old version before v1.10), do not attempt to upgrade. Legacy themes have a different file structure and upgrading is much more involved and manual. Reach out to your Admin or through the Hitchhikers Community”.
I’ve been having trouble out what the steps are to perform a legacy upgrade (I need to upgrade 1.8 to 1.30) and was looking for some guidance on how to approach this!
Thank you!
Hey Diana, there is a little extra work to update between such a wide range of versions. Version 1.16.0 had particular changes you can learn more about here. Aside from that there is not an a single outline, so you should expect to hit some additional speed bumps. I would recommend referencing a fresh 1.30 site to be able to see what an end state should look like file name/location wise.
Lastly it was somewhat common (though never advised) for older implementations to edit theme files directly instead of creating overrides. Confirm this isn’t the case before starting otherwise you might lose any functionality implemented there.
Hi Diana,
Sounds like you’re following the Theme Upgrade training, which is the right place to start and links out to the Answers Hitchhiker Theme Changelog. This outlines the changes you’ll have to make for every version, including v1.16.0 that Tristan linked above, paying extra attention to any breaking changes.
As an alternative, since you are making such a big jump in version number, I would actually suggest you rebuild the experience on a new branch.
To do this, in the Code Editor for the site, select to create a new branch using the Search Jambo Template. This will create a fresh branch using the latest theme template - you’re essentially starting with a new repo. (Typically, when you create a new branch, you do it off of master or another existing branch, which makes a copy of that branch. Here you’re making a copy of the theme template.)
You’ll have to re-add each page and card of the search experience and add any styling or customizations. However, this saves you the trouble of going through updates for every theme version, which may be complicated. Make sure to QA the experience thoroughly before merging the branch onto master and pushing the update to the live site.
The search experience will still live in the same Pages site and domain, so there are no changes needed for the integration or from your client. You may want to let your client know the site will have some cool new features and an updated modern UI (from theme 1.19). Of course, if there are any new features you want to remove, you can follow the instructions from that theme version.
Feel free to follow up if you have any questions. Let us know if this works out for you!
Kristy
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