Upgrading your store assets

For existing WebSphere Commerce customers who are looking to upgrade to the next release, there are a number of approaches that you can take to upgrade your store. Review your requirements, and chose the proper path to upgrade your store assets to take advantage of the supplied features in the Aurora starter store.

Depending on your requirements, the approach to upgrading your store assets can vary.
Note: If you are a new WebSphere Commerce customer, start your project by using the Aurora starter store as the starting point for customization.
To upgrade a store, choose one of these typical scenarios:
Scenario For more information, see
You do not need to keep any assets from your existing web store. You are looking for a full refresh on the look and feel of the site.

The full refresh scenario is the most straight forward upgrade path. Replacing the store gives you all of the capabilities that the Aurora store has.

To upgrade your store assets by replacing an existing store with the Aurora starter store, see Replacing an existing store with Aurora.
You want to keep most of your current store, but you want to use Commerce Composer. To enable Commerce Composer with your store, see Task flow: Enabling Commerce Composer support for a starter store.
Note: After you enable Commerce Composer for your current store, the store uses Commerce Composer for most of your pages. No other capabilities are added, and no changes happen on your store's My Account and checkout pages.
Your store uses Commerce Composer. You want to use the new capability of the Commerce Composer widgets and the Aurora store. Your store has little customization, and you can update the existing customization in a new code base. You do not need to keep your existing layouts, and you can re-create all of your layouts by using Management Center. For more information about upgrading your store assets by replacing an existing store with the Aurora starter store, see Replacing an existing store with Aurora.
You store uses Commerce Composer. You want to use the new capability of the Commerce Composer widgets and the Aurora store. Your store has little customization, and you can update the existing customization in a new code base. You want to keep your existing layouts, but you want the layouts to use the newest Commerce Composer widgets and Aurora store assets. For more information about updating to a newer version of Commerce Composer, see Updating to a newer version of Commerce Composer widgets.

After you enable Commerce Composer, your store can use all of the capabilities that the Aurora store offers.

You want to keep most of your current store, and you want to selectively pick functions from the Aurora starter store. Extract code examples from the Aurora store and add them to your customized store as needed.