Considerations for upgrading
  • 21 Jun 2022
  • 2 minutes to read

Considerations for upgrading


Article Summary

When upgrading there are many things to consider both from a technical and training perspective. It is important to ensure all elements of your system are technically compatible, including your theme and any customisations. You will also want to make sure any training materials, and indeed any trainers, are up-to-date with new features and improvements. 

Changelogs

It is important to review the changelogs and make sure you understand what is changing. New features and improvements are likely to bring changes to interfaces, behaviour, and workflows. Our changelogs will help you identify which areas have changed, so you can then find information on new behaviours and workflows on this help site. This is important so that any internal training material you have can be updated and staff trainers can learn about what has changed.

You should also review any new administration settings, as new controls get added with every major release. These added controls may facilitate new functionality, improve security, or allow further customisation. Each setting should be reviewed so that you can check your Totara site configuration is current and understood.

System requirements may also change and although these will have no impact on those using the site, you will need to review them to ensure they are met during deployment of the new release. 

Changelogs can be found published in the release notes area of the Totara community and in the product source code within the changelog.md file.

Themes

User experience (UX) changes will mean that you will need to review your theme. It is likely there will be new places that need to be styled to make them look a part of your site. This is because HTML structure, CSS classes, and Javascript changes have been made. New features also bring new interfaces.

The Standard Totara responsive, Custom Totara responsive, bootstrap base, and Kiwifruit responsive themes have been removed from Totara v10+. You can read more in the Totara developer documentation.

Customisations

Our APIs can change significantly between major releases. We have a deprecation policy that ensures that all changes where possible are backwards compatible and that customisations will continue to function in the short term. When backwards compatibility is being used developer debugging information will be printed out to inform you that customisations and plugins will need to be updated. It is important these changes are made as backwards compatibility is only maintained for a limited time (typically one major release).

Incompatible API changes are rare, but they do occur. If you have customisations using API that no longer function you will be presented with a debugging notice and you'll find that your customisations don't function as they should.

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