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Upgrade procedure

PREREQUISITES: Before you upgrade your Sitefinity CMS, ensure the following:
  • You have backed up your project and its database.
  • You are familiar with the API changes for the Sitefinity CMS release you are upgrading to. For more information, see API breaking changes in Sitefinity CMS.
  • You have upgraded your Microsoft .NET framework to the respective version.
    For more information, see Reference: Sitefinity CMS and .NET framework compatibility.
  • Your project is not located in a folder that has any special characters in the name, such as ~\Program Files (x86).

You must use the following upgrade paths, depending on your current Sitefinity CMS version:

  • If your project is on Sitefinity CMS 10.0 or above, you must use Sitefinity CLI to upgrade.
    Sitefinity CLI upgrades the project and installs the NuGet packages automatically and has the following advantages:
    • CLI automatically handles broken or missing references
    • The target framework of the upgraded project is automatically set to the relevant Sitefinity CMS framework version.
    • The CLI automatically fixes binding redirects
    • All Sitefinity projects in the solution are automatically upgraded without the need to manually go through them. 
    • You can include it as a step in a Continuous integration pipeline.
  • If your project is on Sitefinity CMS 8.0 to 9.2, you must use NuGet package to upgrade.
    By updating the version of Telerik.Sitefinity.All package, you upgrade all Sitefinity CMS related packages in your projects.
    As of Sitefinity CMS version 11.0 NuGet takes care of updating the project references and applying the necessary web.config changes automatically. If upgrading to version prior to 11.0 you must take care of these changes manually.
  • If your project in on Sitefinity CMS 7.3 or below, you must use the Project Manager to upgrade it to Sitefinity CMS 8.0, then upgrade it to 8.1 and above using the NuGet package.
    The Project Manager adds the new assemblies to the bin folder, and also offers the option to automatically upgrade your web.config file and assembly references.

RECOMMENDATION: We recommend that you always upgrade to the latest version. 
However, you may want to upgrade to any other version. For example, you may want to upgrade from Sitefinity CMS 5.2 to 8.1.
For more information, see Reference: Upgrade to lower than the latest version of Sitefinity CMS.

NOTE: Sitefinity CMS 13.1 has introduced changes to its Native API for working with multilingual content. The previous multilingual APIs are deprecated and no longer work, starting with Sitefinity CMS 13.1. To learn how to upgrade your custom multilingual code, see Upgrade custom multilingual code.

Depending on your current Sitefinity CMS version, use one of the following upgrade procedures:
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