Sitecore Upgrade Notes from Sitecore 8.1 to 9.3

Sitecore Developer, , ,

This blog contains short notes of the activities we performed and issues faced during upgrade from Sitecore 8.1 to 9.3. For each point, I will try to add a detailed blog and add a link here.

Below are the details of the website that is being upgraded –

  • Multisite
  • Multilingual
  • Uses device-specific layouts
  • Replaced TDS with Unicorn in Version 9.3
  • Azure AD B2C Login Integration using OpenIdConnect
  • Not using SXA

Notes –

  1. Steps performed to integrate Azure AD B2C with Sitecore 9.3 are mentioned in my other blog.
  2. We started out with updating the framework of the project in solution. Then we updated the Sitecore dlls and its dependencies in each project in the solution. We encountered minor errors where code used was deprecated in Sitecore 9.3 version, so updated that code so that the solution is able to build successfully.
  3. We updated the master database of Sitecore 8.1 using scripts provided by Sitecore and added the connection string for this database in our Sitecore 9.3 installation. We were not sure if this is the right way to go ahead initially. But during the upgrade, we encountered few issues which made us conclude that it is better to upgrade the content using packages or unicorn sync. So we created content packages from Sitecore 8.1 and installed it in Sitecore 9.3.
  4. The device detection was not working properly after the upgrade. The pages were not picking up the correct layout based on the rules specified. On RCA, we found out that Sitecore 9.3 has few different templates than Sitecore 8.1, so we discarded the old rules and setup new rules for device. That made it work. This was one of the issues that made us use unicorn sync for database upgrade rather than using scripts provided by Sitecore.
  5. We had a switching link provider in Sitecore 8.1 solution and a custom link provider as well. As LinkProviders got obsolete in Sitecore 9.3, we could not use our Custom Link Provider as well as switching link provider functionality anymore. So, I created a CustomItemUrlBuilder that replaced the above two. Will add a blog about it in future.
  6. There were few WFFM forms present in our site. We created sitecore forms manually for 1 country in sitecore 9.3 then duplicated it for other countries using SPE.