I've been given the task of finding out the time necessary to upgrade 2.x version of DNN to 4.x.  It sounds to me like this is going to be quite the task, and there are a few custom modules as well.  My question is how long do you think upgrading takes?  Any general estimates or is each case dramatically different.

Thanks

I would guesstimate that this is a job that will take a couple of days, assuming that you are proficient with DotNetNuke. I'm not familiar at all with version 2.x, so I am making some guesses.

On major question is what modules you have installed on your site. A list would help.

Also, if you have standard modules and 2.x can export a site template, that might be your best approach. You'd export a site template from your current site, create 4.x site, import the template, and then compare the sites. Then you'll need to fix the test site to make it correspond to the live site.

After that, you'll need to take your test site and move it to the NEW live site. In doing this, you'll need to make sure that your live site has the resources to run DNN 4.x. In particular, you'll need to update to .Net 2.x.

Then, you can move your test site into your live site. You'll likely want to try this once to a non-live site.

Take things slowly, and look especially at the tutorials here that move live to localhost and localhost to live!

The major thing that could take time for the upgrade is the custom modules. I don't know if you know, when DNN went from v2.x to v3.x there were breaking changes in the code and some modules have to be re-written to be compatible with v3.x.

- I don't think site templates were introduced in v2.x so I don't think it is an option.

I would suggest you first of all take a copy of your live site and install it on localhost and then try to upgrade it to v3.x and see how it reacts - test the custom modules extensively to see if they are compatible. (I can't remember what the breaking changes were, so you may have to search around on that one.)

Once you have got it working on v3.x then you can try upgrading to v4.x. - I would probably allow at least a week. - If you have to re-programme your modules, could be longer.

I would look at these before attempting anything to give you a starting point:

• How to backup a live hosted DotNetNuke website and restore it to a localhost installation
• How to transfer a localhost DotNetNuke installation to a live website
• How to Upgrade DotNetNuke v3.x to v4.4.1
• How to upgrade DotNetNuke from v3.x to v3.2 on a live website

Thanks,

PS. The localhost tutorials cover using SQL Server express, for DNN v2.x I think you will need to be using SQL Server 2000 or 2005 on your local computer - you will need to check what it is with your hosting provider, my DNNv2.x installs are on SQL Server 2000, ASP.NET 1.1. - You can get a developers version of the software to run on your personal computer for about £40 from amazon.