Upgrading To Magento 1.4

Posted by Mike on February 18, 2010 |

me
Category: questions, web design, web development

With the recent release of Magento version 1.4, many people are having trouble upgrading their current Magento installation, or installing their template on a fresh Magento 1.4 installation. A quick search online and you’ll find countless entries and posts stating that Magento 1.4 is buggy, not working, horrible, etc. Particularly when you browse through the Magento forums.

In fact Magento 1.4 is different than the last previous stable version (1.3.2.4) but you should definitely be able to upgrade your installation, or install your custom template on a Magento 1.4 installation! Here are the most common issues and how to fix them!

Magento modern theme 1.4

This relates to the following issues:

Can’t install Modern Theme through Magento Connect
- Get error “magento-core/Interface_Frontend_Default_Modern requires package “magento-core/Mage_Core_Modules” (version >= 1.3.2.2, version <= 1.3.3, excluded versions: 1.3.3), installed version is 1.4.0.0
  Install Errors
  No valid packages found
  PEAR ERROR: install failed
Can’t upgrade Modern Theme through Magento Connect
- Get similar error as above
etc

As of now, there is no good way to install or upgrade the Modern Theme via Magento Connect. BUT you should definitely be able to get it by installing a fresh Magento 1.4 installation.

Magento 1.4 comes by default with the default theme, the modern theme, and the iphone optimized theme. However, you’d have to install Magento manually and NOT use the downloader (as this will include the default theme only). Here is one way to install Magento 1.4 manually:

Download all the files on your computer and upload them on your server
Create a database and a database user and grant that user all permissions to the database. Make sure to write down your database name, database user name, and database user password.
Go to the URL that points to your server and follow the instructions to complete Magento installation

Can’t access admin, blank page, products won’t load, error, etc

Most issues will be resolved once you reindex Magento data and refresh all Magento cache. To reindex Magento data follow these quick steps:

Go to System>Index Management
Click on “select all” in the upper left corner
Under “Action” select “Reindex Data” and click submit

To refresh all Magento cache following these quick steps:

Go to System>Configuration and
Click on “select all” in the upper left corner
Under “action” click on “refresh” and click submit
Then click on these buttons:
1. Flush Magento Cache
2. Flush Cache Storage
3. Fluch Catalog Images Cache
4. Flush JavaScript/CSS Cache

Upgrading your existing theme (modern or else)

Obviously I cannot cover here all the possible problems and issues that may arise when upgrading your particular template to be compatible with Magento 1.4. However, I found that the most common issue is “Categories not working after upgrading to 1.4″. This relates to the error people get when clicking on some categories: “Error processing your request” followed by a number.

To fix that, you’ll need to do 2 things:

1. First, edit your toolbar.phtml file located under app/design/frontend/default/yourthemename/template/catalog/product/list. Take the updated toolbar.phtml from the new 1.4 default theme (located under app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalog/product/list) and use it in your theme. Then edit that file to apply any styling you had in your original toolbar.phtml file. Another way of doing it is editing your toolbar.phml file to use the right class names and code (you can compare with the default one and take it from there).

2. Second, open catalog.xml located under app/design/frontend/default/yourthemename/layout/ and find this line:

<block type="catalog/product_list_toolbar" name="product_list_toolbar" template="catalog/product/list/toolbar.phtml">

And underneath insert this code:

<block type="page/html_pager" name="product_list_toolbar_pager"/>

Note: most likely the above code is present in 2 places in the catalog.xml file so make sure to add the new line underneath in both places.

And that should do it!

Tags: ecommerce, magento, templates, themes, update

cee carvajal - February 18th, 2010

This article is a life saver. You should send it to magento or something because so many people are struggling with. There are over 17 pages of complaints and half fixes on the forum but nothing a precise as this explaination.

Thank you so much!!

Noam - February 21st, 2010

You’re welcome!

Magento Developer - February 21st, 2010

You saved me! Thank you very much!

DCA - February 22nd, 2010

Great article but you forget to explain how to solve toolbar problem at results catalogsearch page.

Noam - February 22nd, 2010

@DCA – what bug are you having on the search result page?

Jesse - February 22nd, 2010

Thanks!

@jesse – you’re welcome!

Tomakun - February 22nd, 2010

Thanks for this useful post. I’d like to point out the part at the end of the article, where you’re speaking about the catalog.xml update. You write “underneath insert this code:”

While the Magento Releases notes states “should be replaced into”. Now this is very different to me. Which one should we use?

@Tomakun – I’ve personally tested the steps in this post so I would go that route

AmDD - February 24th, 2010

DCA is looking at the search results page which does not show pagination after fixing the pagination on category display pages. The catalogsearch.xml file does not have a similar place where you might add the line:

So the question remains how to fix the toolbar for pagination in the search results page…

Noam - May 27th, 2010

Here is how to fix the pagination in the search result and advanced search result pages: http://www.noamdesign.com/blog/magento-pagination-disappears-on-the-search-results-page-after-upgrading-to-1-4/

Bobbie - February 26th, 2010

Yes, please let us know how to fix the lack of pagination on the advanced search results. Thanks!

Noam - February 27th, 2010

@Bobbie @AmDD @DCA – We’ll write a post on how to fix the bug on the search result pages. Stay tuned next week!

http://www.noamdesign.com/blog/magento-pagination-disappears-on-the-search-results-page-after-upgrading-to-1-4/

Mick - February 27th, 2010

Thanks for the tips, that’s cleared a few things up!

You’ve a slight typo in the last section:
app/design/frontent/default/yourthemename/template/catalog/product/list

frontent instead of frontend

@Mick – Thanks! I fixed the typo

eCommerce-Themes.com - March 2nd, 2010

It might be worth mentioning that the amount of work related to upgrading your theme would greatly depend on how many custom templates you had to modify from the default Magento theme.

Theme with mostly css change will require limited fixes related to css.

Paddy - March 3rd, 2010

Thanks for the info on this page it really helped me, along with this page which got my upgrade to 1.3 working http://askmatt.co.uk/blog/2010/03/base-table-or-view-already-exists-1050-table-already-exists-upgrade-1-3-2-4-to-1-4-0-1-failed-how-to-fix/

Rick - March 5th, 2010

Had the same error issues, this comment from the Magento Forums helped me out:

“For anyone still having the problem after upgrading to 1.4.0.x where you only see the Dashboard and System Menus in the admin area (and also your products are not showing), this is what fixed it for me.

1) Make sure your magento directory has full privileges for the user that the installer is running under
2) SSH to your magento directory
3) Run the following commands:
a) ./pear mage-setup .
b) ./pear install magento-core/Mage_All_Latest
c) ./pear upgrade-all

*Note that in command a, the period is not a mistake, you must include that

4) Delete the contents of the Cache and Sessions folders
*Note that if you delete the entire Cache directory, you have to make sure you re-allow write permissions to the folder after the system recreates it, otherwise you will get an error when you go to the web page

5) Log in to the admin area. If your navigation is back, you’re in good shape.
6) There should be a warning message telling you to re-index your catalog, go to Index Management and re-index everything ”

11th Comment Down, by mmm7L:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/76543/

Any ideas why I can’t pull a custom template for root in one of my CMS pages, specifically home?

Brandon - March 9th, 2010

Thank you for this post! This saved me a ton of development time.

AmDD - March 17th, 2010

The app/design/frontend/base/default/template/contacts/form.phtml has changed in 1.4
It now contains a hidden field called hideit which must be in the the form for it to validate. Otherwise you get the “Unable to submit your request. Please, try again later” error.

Greg - March 18th, 2010

Have you come across a problem with creating products? Something happened to my installation of Magento and i’m now not seeing all the product attributes (name, price, weight, etc) when i try to create a new simple product.

I’ve installed a fresh copy of Magento on my webserver and using a new database but i’m seeing the same thing. Very frustrating!

Noam - April 6th, 2010

@Greg – try reindexing all the data (it’s a new feature in Magento 1.4). That’s most likely what your problem is. The steps to reindex the data are explained in the post

Richard - March 22nd, 2010

The fix seems to work well, however I made the mistake to directly copy the fix from this page into my xml file, resulting into a new xml error.

The code on this site is formatted with different quotation marks so be sure to correct those in your catalog.xml to avoid any new errors.

Noam - May 13th, 2010

Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed the formatting of the quotation marks in the post so people can safely copy and paste the code.

AmDD - April 5th, 2010

The app/design/frontend/base/default/template/sendfriend/send.phtml has changed in 1.4
Add the line
getBlockHtml(‘formkey’)?> somewhere inside the form for it to pass validation and actually send the form.
No error message will be shown if it is missing the email just will not be sent.

@AmDD – thanks for the comments!

Mike Duan - May 2nd, 2010

This is a very helpful resource.

Pierre-Alix Tremblay - May 17th, 2010

Hi,
I can’t access admin CMS>Page so I try to go to System>Index Management but I can’t access too !
I’ve got : “There has been an error processing your request”

How can I fix it ?

Noam - May 17th, 2010

Delete all files and folder under var/cache/ and var/sessions/ and delete your browser cache and cookies then log back in the admin. It should work.

Magento - May 20th, 2010

Life saving article indeed! Thanks!

manawor - June 19th, 2010

Hello,

i have just upgraded to magento1.3 to magento1.4 version fixed couple of bugs now i am stuck to a cart page i am getting following error , we have multiple store setup and each has its own domain .

Fatal error: Call to a member function getGrandTotal() on a non-object in /var/www/vhosts/comitstores.com/subdomains/dev/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Tax/Block/Checkout/Grandtotal.php on line 44

beside above error i am noticing my unit price and subtotal is not getting calculated its all zero. i have checked at admin side for inverntory ,price and taxes are setup correctly .No idea what to do .

any help would be apprecuated.

thanks

manawor

ChiefAir - August 2nd, 2010

Thank you for the instructions on toolbar.phtml, now I have to massage the CSS into life and we’ll be back up! I have a few other places where I can see this will break, will know what to look for.

omur - October 11th, 2010

How can I update magento 1.3.x theme to magento 1.4.x

Download Magento Themes - December 18th, 2010

Thanks for this! Its really very much beneficial..

Naresh - January 10th, 2011

I just upgraded from 1.3.2 to 1.4.0.1 via magento connect and I am not able to see anything on the site. I am not able to access the admin pages or the front end. This is disaster I am not sure what I need to do ?? Please help.

It always redirects me to a page http://officeduniya.com/errors/report.php?id=947676965570&skin=default , some kind of error. I changed permissions for few files but nothing helps. Any hep would be appreciated.

I was able to get a screen shot when loading happen and it shows an error “Integrity Constraint Violation : 1062 Duplicate entry “109-General” for key attribute_set_id” ..Any ideas ???

Brandon - February 1st, 2011

I just upgraded from 1.30 to 1.4.2 everything seems to work fine but except that I cannot add items to cart, any thought on this?

magento webwinkel - March 31st, 2011

Thanks for this, we still work with Magento 1.4 because 1.5 is stable but a lot of extensions are not working very well.

Sajid - April 24th, 2011

Well ,

to be honest when magento update thier version they should write any thing for changes require in code or for theme but they dont we sometimes make money with redoing work for clients but as wise development way or with hard client we got issues , and their support is also worst either on forums,chat or Gold Support

we wrote our bad experience with them in words here
http://www.dacoders.com/2011/04/24/magento-thier-support-good-bad/

Magento Developer - August 30th, 2011

Now upgrade to magento 1.6

http://www.expertmagentodevelopers.com/blog/how-to-upgrade-from-magento-1-5-1-to-magento-1-6-0/

Upgrading To Magento 1.4

Magento modern theme 1.4

Can’t access admin, blank page, products won’t load, error, etc

Upgrading your existing theme (modern or else)

43 Comments

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