NEWSCYCLE Digital/Saxotech has informed you that you are scheduled for their newest upgrade. From our experience the process usually allows for testing the upgrade in the dev and stage environment before it is pushed live. If you were like me, you would check out your dev and stage sites, click around and think, “yep, its good.” Most times everything is fine, sometimes it isn’t. This is a list of items we ourselves check and go through after an upgrade has been added to our sites.
Release Notes
- Release notes will provide the most important and obvious things to test on your site’s setup. There is a page that lists the major new features included in each release: https://docs.saxotech.com/display/Onl/Major+New+Features+By+Version. There is another page that lists the bug fixes for each service release of that version: https://docs.saxotech.com/display/Onl/Release+Notes. It is highly recommended that you go through these list of items and test them thoroughly.
Articles in the Edit Interface
- If possible, have an Edit Interface set up in the staging environment so that you can test these items before going live. If this is not possible, after going live we recommend testing these items right away.
- Try and open an article to edit it, and just click save. Make sure there are no errors while saving.
- Test uploading a single image.
- Test uploading a batch of images.
- Select and assign taxonomy, keywords and save.
- Test that the preview tab works.
User Submitted Content and CCE
- For this example, we will use one of the most complex functionalities of CCE, the events submission form. We will use this because it contains the majority of functionality that a CCE object can use.
- Submit the form and check that all fields make it into the EI
- If using recurrence, check each of the patterns and make sure they are coming through correctly
- Test that the time for 12am and 12pm show correctly
- Test uploading a single image.
- Test uploading a batch of images.
- Activate CCE object and make sure it displays correctly on the site.
Note: When testing items that we don’t want a user to see, we set the date back enough where the article or cce item has to be searched for so that the likelihood of a user viewing the test data is slim. We remove when finished.
- Forms that get emailed from a site user to an admin or editor. For example, a contact us form that gets sent from the user to the editor.
- Check that emails that are sent.
- Check that all fields are going through.
- Forms that get sent from the site to the user. For example, a verify registration to the site email, sent to the user.
- Check that the form gets mailed. For example, a contact us form that gets sent from the user to the editor.
- Check that any links in the emails are displaying and working correctly.
Search
- Search for an article or CCE item on the site and make sure the correct results are returned.
Scripts
- If you have functionality on your site using scripts, double check that those scripts are running and working as expected.
Browsers
- Many of the issue we see are related to newsooms without updated computers and browsers. If possible have an editor who works with the EI regularly go through these same steps and make sure that the functionality is working for them. You can find the browsers that are supported by NEWSCYCLE Digital/Saxotech here: https://docs.saxotech.com/display/Onl/Supported+Browsers
|
Browser
|
Supported Versions
|
Platform
|
|---|---|---|
| Internet Explorer | 9, 10 | Windows |
| Firefox | 21,22 | Windows/Mac |
| Safari | 5,6 | Mac |
Upgrade Test Plan
We have created a test plan to help you get started on testing your new upgrade:
XLS: http://bit.ly/16Fpm6c
HTML: http://bit.ly/1bhh39k
PDF: http://bit.ly/1dO0KOH
In Conlusion
Upgrades happen on a pretty regular basis and we will continue to update this post as we discover more items to be on the lookout for.
Please share your thoughts or experiences with upgrades below.
