If you want to upgrade your installation of Zinnia from a previous release, it’s easy, but you need to be cautious. The whole process takes less than 15 minutes.
The first thing to do is a to dump your data for safety reasons.
$ python manage.py dumpdata --indent=2 zinnia > dump_zinnia_before_migration.json
The main problem with the upgrade process is the database. The Zinnia’s models can have changed with new or missing fields. That’s why Zinnia use South‘s migrations to facilitate this step.
So we need to install the South package.
$ easy_install south
South needs to be registered in your project’s settings as an INSTALLED_APPS. Once it is done, use syncdb to finish the installtaion of South in your project.
$ python manage.py syncdb
Now we will install the previous migrations of Zinnia to synchronize the current database schema with South.
$ python manage.py migrate zinnia --fake
We are now ready to upgrade Zinnia. If you want to use the latest stable version use easy_install with this command :
$ easy_install -U zinnia
or if you prefer to upgrade from the development release, use pip like that :
$ pip install -U -e git://github.com/Fantomas42/django-blog-zinnia.git#egg=django-blog-zinnia
The database should probably be updated to the latest database schema of Zinnia, South will be useful.
$ python manage.py migrate zinnia
The database is now up to date, and ready to use.
In order to finish the upgrade process, we must check if everything works fine by browsing the website.
By experience, problems mainly come from customized templates, because of changes in the url reverse functions.