nopCommerce - Painless Upgrade from 3.1 to 3.3

We are upgrading from our current nopCommerce 3.1 platform to the latest 3.3 version. It was a fair amount of works and efforts but not bad at all. Glad that I took away the pain by utilizing MVC and n-tier techniques in earlier days.

Walkthrough

1. Pay attention to 
   1. Use NuGet to fix any packages.config package version issue.
   2. .net framework target
   3. Nop.Admin\sitemap.config
   4. Any RouteProvider, GenericUrlRouteProvider, DependencyRegister
   5. Themes Folder
   6. Custom keys in Web.Config
   7. Custom Controllers
2. What I noticed
1. BaseNopController now split into BasePublicController and BaseAdminController
2. BaseNopPaymentController is renamed to BasePaymentController
3. My payment plugin that implements IPaymentMethod now need to implement the SkipPaymentInfo method. This method is used by CheckoutController if payment info should be skipped. (Why don't we call it RequirePaymentInfo? ^^")
4. CategoryNavigationModel.CategoryModel became CategorySimpleModel
5. Follow compiler error, the followings are to be fixed
1. Change from private to protected for methods or properties that was customized in the core.
2. Recreate any hook
6. For Kendo UI, replace,
   1. GridCommand -> DataSourceRequest
   2. GridModel -> DataSourceResult (and remove strongly type)
   3. Remove Grid Attribute
7. Reinstall and fix any 7spike plugin issues. Be warned, the AjaxFilter one is problematic!!
8. Our own custom plugins worked seamless :) Just need to update the supported version from 3.1 to 3.3, or else the plugin list won't load the plugins.
9. Copy and replace Web.Config from other nop plugins to our custom plugins.

Thoughts

As you can see, there were lots of work involved but I wouldn't say it was upgrade-resistance. The Kendo UI upgrade was huge, but it is for a good sake. Telerik is just overdue to retire.

What do I need for upgrading from 3.3 to 3.4?

• This cheat sheet
• And, a cup of coffee.