This past weekend I have been attempting to upgrade our Rhythmyx 5.7 installation to the latest version of 6.1. Here are some details of my experience, and some tips for others who might be doing the same.
Installation:
The installation (once all the settings had been chosen and accepted) seemed a bit flakey - it took me about 5 attempts to get a successful install where the Rhythmyx server would start up correctly. Several times the installer froze on the full text search installtion - sitting at 98% for about half an hour before closing itself with no message. The final attempt I ended up just leaving the installer running and coming back to it about 2 hours later, and it had completed. Once I had got a successful install message everything started fine.
One thing that seemed very odd, is that where my C:\Rhythmyx directory was around 900mb before upgrade, it now seems to take up around 9GB! Is this normal?
First time use:
It’s worth mentioning here that I havent had any Rhythmyx 6 training, so I was going into this a bit blind, with only the documentation to help me, and I have to say that the new documentation set is a vast improvement on the previous one.
When I first logged in to the Content Explorer, for some reason my LDAP/NT Security configuration hadn’t migrated, so I had to use the database users in the USERLOGIN table - loading up the Server Administrator to fix the LDAP settings seemed to work the same as in 5.7, but none of the settings used in my 5.7 implementation seemed to work (this is possibly more of an internal issue than Rhythmyx, but I’d be interested to know if anything has changed with the LDAP implementation?)
The first thing I noticed as a major change was that if a content editor application doesnt start, you now cannot see the items in the content explorer like you can in 5.7. If any of your items are missing, check that the application has started ok - in my case it was two content types that use the RxCheckBoxTree control from the PSOToolKit. The checkboxtree no longer worked as the PSOExpandHTMLParameter no longer worked. Is the PSOToolKit still available under Rx6, or is there a new version on the way?
Managed Navigation:
None of my managed navigation worked initially, and after some trawling through documentation and the readme, I found a SQL statement in the readme.txt (24. Functionality Loss After Upgrade) which tidied up “dangling Variant-Slot records” and after that the managed nav was fine.
Database Publishing:
None of my database publishing variants would generate under Rhythmyx 6, and ultimately my inability to fix this over the weekend meant I had to roll back to Rhythmyx 5.7 for our live system so that our users could access it this week. I was at a bit of a loss as to why they wouldnt work. Do the database publishing variants need rebuilding for Rhythmyx 6? I had attempted to rebuild one of them, but ran into problems replicating some of the logic that I had in 5.7 - conditional statements etc.
Something that would be very useful from a developer perspective, would be a crib list of the main functions in Rhythmyx 5.7, and their replacements in 6.1. For example, the sys_casGeneratePubLocation function is used quite extensively in our implementation, but I was struggling to find the equivalent in 6.1.
Positives:
File system publishing seems much quicker under 6.1 - even before converting templates to Velocity. Editions that previously took around 2 hours, were down to under an hour, which is very pleasing.
The new workbench is also very good - although coming from 5.5 and 5.7, is a little confusing on where to find things. I can see that it will be much better once I get the hang of it though.