How to Migrate from Platform to PageLines

The PageLines Framework is a major new release to the previous PlatformPro product. When upgrading from Platform Pro there are some things to consider.

• Always back up your database before doing an upgrade
• All data will be untouched; your posts, pages and content will all remain intact in the database.
• Default option settings have changed in 2.0 so any default options set in PlatformPro will be removed in the upgrade
• Section control has changed in 2.0 to be more flexible and as a result these settings will need to be reset after the upgrade
• PageLines 2.0 has been upgraded to incorporate HTML 5 and some of the html structure has changed. Sites with heavy CSS customizations will need to make changes to their CSS after the move.
• In 2.0, there is no longer a Base child theme that handles custom code. Instead, use the PageLines Customize Plugin. You can still use the Custom Code Settings to make changes to CSS as an alternate method.

Upgrading and Issues

Aside from a couple communication problems on our part, so far there have been no ‘major’ issues for people upgrading their sites to 2.0 (fingers crossed!). The average time to make the switch ranges from 5 minutes to a few hours depending on the level of customization that was previously applied to the website. That said, there are still a few things you should be aware of when upgrading. They are…

The Good News → “Non-Destructive Upgrade” – Because we knew there would be some issues with upgrading the framework, we worked to make sure the upgrade was “non-destructive.” This means that if you try and upgrade and don’t like what you see, or don’t have time to fix a couple issues, you can always revert to PlatformPro. Easy.

CSS Changes – In developing the framework, it’s very difficult to prevent CSS changes from happening once and a while on upgrade. With 2.0 there were a few changes to markup (e.g. using ‘section’ as opposed to ‘div’ elements in some cases…) This has caused a couple issues. Solution The minor CSS problems can be fixed easily by correcting your custom css rules to align with the new elements.

Section Control – To improve the functionality of Section Control, we had to change the way its data was stored in the DB. Therefore section control options get wiped on upgrade. Solution Simply set these options again and you are good to go.

Global vs. Meta Options – To give you more control over your pages, we moved many section options to the MetaPanel. This means that the global options are no longer relevant. Solution Simply setup meta options for customized sections across your site; a new default option handling system is coming with version 2.1.