Upgrading from EE2 to EE3 at end of 2016 - is it worth the effort?

Question

we are running a bigger site with EE2. We did not upgrade to EE3 because there have been missing important addons. Now we are relaunching the frontend and we are considering the upgrade.

The upgrade will be a lot of work, because still some addons are missing (like CE-Cache) or will have to be replaced.

We fear that the effort is senseless because maybe faster than expected the next major version appears (let it be EE4 or whatever) and we are facing the same problems, running a legacy version.

I would appreciate your opinion about this very much. Thanks!

Answer 1

The factor to focus on is what your plans are for the site itself into the future. If you plan (or think you will need to) develop the content or operation of the site in the future (e.g. adding new things / services not currently provided) then it is worth considering upgrading to EE3, otherwise the best course is to stay with EE2.

Why? Well it is clear that EllisLabs and the EE hard-core development community are moving on to EE3 - although EE2's EOL has been delayed (due to just the problems with upgrading you outline) EllisLabs will stop maintaining EE2 soon, and there is little or no development going on for EE2 add-ons, which are either being abandoned or migrated to EE3 versions.

The EE2 system you have now, while it will continue to work 'as-is', will get harder to develop: you'll be stuck with your current version of php, and with the set of Add-ons you have now. You will be able to re-skin the front end of the site and keep that up to date, but the underlying data model will be limited to being something similar to what you have today.

Upgrading to EE3 is non-trivial (outside of the "no add-ons used" edge case), but would appear to be essential for a site that will need back-end development in years to come.

There are now EE3 alternatives to most of the widely used EE2 add-ons that haven't got EE3 versions - though replacing them is not always easy. Others are still in the pipeline (e.g. Assets has just released an EE3 beta..., Publisher is '2-4 weeks' away from releasing a beta). So while it was almost impossible to migrate some sites a few months ago, it would seem that by early 2017 most of the obstacles will have been removed. There will be some add-ons that will regrettably remain absent- CE_Cache being one of them, though (if you can get your brain around it) it looks like you can get a similar result using the caching features of {stash}.

Tough call though. Hope these thoughts useful etc.

Answer 2

If your site relies on CE-Cache I wouldn't bother updating while EE2 is still receiving updates as sites that rely on that aren't going to get anything better on EE3 at the moment.

There is very little difference from a templating point of view between EE2 and EE3, so personally in your situation I would refresh my frontend in EE2 then at a later date make the minor frontend adjustments to move to EE3.

Answer 3

Just depends on functionality. There are limited EE3 plugins at this point, but the market seems to be growing. We've had challenges with the few third party fieldtypes in EE3 allowing users to have more flexibility in editing contents (mainly Content Elements, which doesn't exist on EE3...used for table data allowing users to modify columns/rows).

We also were using Structure and Blueprints pretty consistently on every EE2 site, but now that Structure is compatible with EE3 that's definitely a plus. Without Blueprints or something similar, I am having to create more channels, which is kind of a pain, because I find myself duplicating some of the same fields for each channel which requires twice the templates.

Hope that helps!