Sitecore 8 - Taking the Leap

We made the decision to upgrade one of our current projects from Sitecore 7.5 to the newly released 8. As the architect, it was my job to make sure that all that we had built so far, transitioned smoothly over to the new version.

All of our code and serialized Sitecore items were safely within our Git Repository in the VisualStudio.com cloud.

These are the steps that I took in our upgrade process:

1. Uninstalled Sitecore 7.5
2. Deleted the leftover files in my 7.5 instance location in wwwroot
3. Downloaded and installed 8.0 from dev.sitecore.net (it's not actually on SDN, which was interesting). I gave my 8.0  instance the same name as my 7.5, just to make things easier when syncing things back up using  Team Development for Sitecore (TDS).
4. Downloaded and installed the modules that we are using. In this case, I downloaded and installed the Commerce Connect 7.5 module.
5. Updated our Sitecore referenced assemblies to the new versions. We use a hosted NuGet server, so I created a new Sitecore 8 references package and then updated my packages.config files within my solution's projects.
6. Pulled the updated Web.config into my solution and made sure that my config transformations were in place.
7. Synced up my Sitecore instance using the TDS projects and did a build to my instance.

Everything seems to be working like a champ! I did notice that the new version took an abnormally long time to start up for the first time.

Experience / Page Editor Changes

So after getting one of my test pages loaded up within the Experience Editor, I noticed that my inline editing didn't seem to be working when I clicked the Edit button.

While exploring the newly designed ribbon, I noticed an "Editing" checkbox in the "View" tab that is turned off by default.  Checking this box, made my experience editor come to life, and I was a happy camper!