I find it staggering that every release of Magento is a complete gamble as to whether it destroys your store or not. I’ve upgraded Magento sites about 8 times and EVERY time has been an absolute pain in the arse resulting in hours spent fixing annoying niggly errors.

I now take the policy of not upgrading stores. I have a client on 1.3.2.3 and it does most of what they need and is relatively stable – so I leave it that way.

I have setup a staging server to test upgrades on – I just attempted to update a 1.3.2.3 store to 1.4.0.1 and it is an absolute mess – can’t add products, delete products, import products. I’ve spent about half a day troubleshooting it, hitting the Magento forums etc and have finally decided to give up. It simply isn’t worth the effort.

Magento is an exciting product, capability wise, but at present,  I don’t think I’d encourage any more clients to opt for Magento unless there was a reason they HAD to use it. Whilst free software seems great, it’s not free if it costs everyone (client and developer) hours in troubleshooting.