We have been trying to upgrade from the 5 beta version of sugar’s community edition to the full released 5.0 version. In theory this is a very simple proposition and within the admin interface there is an upgrade option where the software will find any new versions then recommend you backup and then upgrade. This worked upgrading from 4.5.1 to 5 beta but it would not upgrade to the new full release. So we found another solution…

Failing the obvious way of upgrading , there is a crude way of doing the job. First you need to create a clean install of Sugar 5.0 and if you have no custom fields it is simply a case of exporting the database from the old Sugar build and then importing it into the new one. But if, like us, you have custom fields there is an option under the admin>studio tab to export the custom fields. All you do is export the custom fields and then import them into the new system.

The previous paragraph is all theory from my point of view as we never managed to get the export to work, so we had to do it the hard way. This consisted of doing a clean install, then manually re-adding the custom fields then importing the database and updating all the fields. It added a good day and a half of work to the move – but I have a lot of grace cause I think Sugar is a great piece of software!