It's only taken four and a bit years, but I finally got around to updating ExpressionEngine on this site. The site was running 2.11.9 and it's now on the latest version, 5.2.4. The main reason for the upgrade was because the way I had been dealing with images and code in blog posts wasn't ideal, it wasn't very flexible or user-friendly when creating content, and on the front end, the output wasn't responsive enough.
And funnily enough I deployed the newly-upgraded site just a few days after EllisLab launched the new version of the ExpressionEngine site. Great minds think alike 😉
Fluid fieldtype
These days 'content' or 'page' builders are quite common features in different CMSs, giving you the ability to add sequential blocks of content where you can choose different content types for each block. That's what I wanted too, being able to mix images and code with text and have the CMS perform certain manipulations on the images and code without having to enter mark-up manually into a WYSIWYG editor.
With EE 2.x, there was no native way to achieve that. There were a couple of third party add-on options, Blocks and Content Elements, but neither are available anymore to download for EE2, so I was going to have to upgrade anyway. And by upgrading I'd be able to take advantage of EE's native Fluid fieldtype which does the same as the previously mentioned add-ons and more recent updates on the theme like Bloqs.
Hurdles (not many)
With such a long time between upgrades, I was expecting the process to be quite troublesome, but it was fairly straightforward. The site used to use Matrix and Playa but, as with the Fluid field, I decided to go with all native EE fieldtype replacements, Grid and Relationships. EllisLab provide the Playa & Matrix Importer for ExpressionEngine 2 and it works fine, creating duplicate fields while leaving your existing Matrix and Playa fields in place.
So the most time-consuming aspect of the upgrade was updating templates to use the new fieldtypes. But I also had a small issue with something trying to load Matrix even though I'd converted all the fields to Grid and then removed the fields and uninstalled the add-on. But if I removed the actual Matrix add-on folder, I'd get an error, even though I went through all the obvious places in the database and manually removed any table rows that were referencing Matrix. So for now, the Matrix folder is still in my add-ons folder, even though it's not being used.
I also spent a bit of time making some older plugins compatible with the new version of EE which in most cases just meant creating an addon.setup.php file, removing the $plugin_info array from the plugin file and adding the details to addon.setup.php instead.
There were quite a few add-ons too which just weren't needed anymore so I simply removed them, so overall add-on usage is much lighter.
return array(
'name' => 'Plugin Name',
'version' => '1.0',
'author' => '',
'author_url' => '',
'description' => '',
'namespace' => '',
);
addon.setup.php filePerformance
I had thought that upgrading to a more recent version of any CMS (assuming that everything else was pretty much the same as in my case) would naturally mean a site would get faster. But it didn't really work out that way. Admittedly, my testing very comprehensive, I just ran the site through wbench once before and after deploying the upgrade. And while the fastest times were tiny bit faster, the median times were a bit slower and the slowest times, a full second slower.
Testing https://www.tyssendesign.com.au/
At Thu Jun 27 18:47:49 2019
10 loops
Fastest Median Slowest Std Dev
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Server performance:
Total application time Unable to be recorded
Host latency:
ajax.googleapis.com:443 35ms 37ms 62ms 8ms
cdn.jsdelivr.net:443 20ms 36ms 153ms 37ms
www.tyssendesign.com.au:443 202ms 206ms 270ms 19ms
Browser performance:
Navigation Start: 0ms 0ms 0ms 0ms
Fetch Start: 2ms 4ms 18ms 4ms
Domain Lookup End: 20ms 24ms 41ms 5ms
Connect Start: 20ms 24ms 41ms 5ms
Domain Lookup Start: 4ms 6ms 41ms 13ms
Secure Connection Start: 223ms 232ms 246ms 7ms
Request Start: 465ms 481ms 501ms 10ms
Connect End: 465ms 481ms 501ms 11ms
Response Start: 1341ms 1504ms 1727ms 124ms
Response End: 1346ms 1519ms 1731ms 122ms
DOM Loading: 1347ms 1509ms 1734ms 123ms
DOM Interactive: 1621ms 1818ms 2094ms 132ms
DOM Content Loaded Event End: 1791ms 1975ms 2173ms 126ms
DOM Content Loaded Event Start: 1791ms 1975ms 2173ms 126ms
Load Event Start: 2110ms 2313ms 2422ms 113ms
DOM Complete: 2110ms 2313ms 2422ms 113ms
Load Event End: 2112ms 2314ms 2423ms 113ms
Testing https://www.tyssendesign.com.au/
At Tue Jul 2 14:33:54 2019
10 loops
Fastest Median Slowest Std Dev
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Server performance:
Total application time Unable to be recorded
Host latency:
cdn.jsdelivr.net:443 20ms 28ms 91ms 21ms
www.tyssendesign.com.au:443 180ms 185ms 188ms 2ms
Browser performance:
Navigation Start: 0ms 0ms 0ms 0ms
Fetch Start: 3ms 4ms 19ms 4ms
Domain Lookup End: 23ms 33ms 46ms 7ms
Connect Start: 23ms 33ms 46ms 7ms
Domain Lookup Start: 4ms 30ms 46ms 14ms
Secure Connection Start: 204ms 223ms 1011ms 238ms
Connect End: 424ms 446ms 1324ms 264ms
Request Start: 424ms 447ms 1326ms 264ms
Response Start: 1512ms 1715ms 2774ms 347ms
Response End: 1515ms 1717ms 2776ms 347ms
DOM Loading: 1518ms 1721ms 2782ms 348ms
DOM Interactive: 1767ms 2044ms 3142ms 352ms
DOM Content Loaded Event End: 2011ms 2209ms 3475ms 413ms
DOM Content Loaded Event Start: 2011ms 2209ms 3475ms 413ms
Load Event Start: 2095ms 2403ms 3483ms 376ms
DOM Complete: 2095ms 2403ms 3483ms 376ms
Load Event End: 2097ms 2404ms 3484ms 376ms
Not really enough of a decline to be concerned about and it's quite likely that my sample size was too small for both before and after to draw any meaningful conclusions. Any improvement in site performance was only going to be a by-product anyway, with the main benefit being a site which is now easier to create content with, and to keep up to date, than it previously was.
So if anyone needs help upgrading ExpressionEngine to the latest version, let me know.