Upgrading to AEM 6.5 Communities upgrading-to-aem-communities

Depending on each site’s topology and features, the following actions may be necessary when upgrading to AEM Communities 6.5 or installing the latest feature pack.

This section is specific to Communities and supplements the information provided in Upgrading to AEM 6.5 (platform).

Upgrading from AEM 6.1 or Later upgrading-from-aem-or-later

Reindex Solr reindex-solr

When installing a new Communities feature pack on a deployment configured with MSRP, it will be necessary to:

Upgrading from AEM 6.0 upgrading-from-aem

If pre-existing UGC needs to be retained, then the means to do so depends on whether the deployment stored UGC on-premise or in the Adobe cloud.

Adobe Cloud Storage adobe-cloud-storage

If the upgraded site was configured to use Adobe cloud storage, then it may appear (incorrectly) as if all UGC has been lost as the SRP methods will be unable to locate the pre-existing UGC in the old location.

Thus, there is the ability to instruct ASRP to use AEM 6.0 compatability-mode to access UGC.

For all AEM 6.3 author and publish instances:

On-premise Storage on-premise-storage

If the upgraded site did not use cloud storage, any pre-existing UGC must be converted to conform to the new structure introduced in AEM 6.1 Communities in support of the common store.

For this purpose, an open source migration tool is available on GitHub:
AEM Communities UGC Migration Tool

Java APIs java-apis

When upgrading from AEM 6.0 social communities to AEM 6.3 Communities, many APIs have been reorganized into different packages. Most should be easily resolved when using an IDE for customization of Communities features.

For details on the deprecated SocialUtils package, visit SocialUtils Refactoring.

See also Using Maven for Communities.

No JSP Component Templates no-jsp-component-templates

The social component framework (SCF) uses the HandlebarsJS (HBS) templating language in place of Java Server Pages (JSP) used prior to AEM 6.0.

In AEM 6.0, the JSP components remained alongside the new HBS framework components in the same location, with the HBS components typically in subfolders named “hbs”.

As of AEM 6.1, the JSP components were completely removed. For Communities, it is recommended to replace all use of JSP components with SCF components.

AEM Communities UGC Migration Tool aem-communities-ugc-migration-tool

The AEM Communities UGC Migration Tool is an open source migration tool, available on GitHub, that can be customized to export UGC from earlier versions of AEM social communities and import into AEM Communities 6.1 or later.

In additin to moving UGC from earlier versions, it is also possible to use the tool to move UGC from one SRP to another, such as from MSRP to DSRP.

Upgrading from AEM 5.6.1 or Earlier upgrading-from-aem-or-earlier

Conceptually, there are three generations of communities components :

Gen 1: Roughly CQ 5.4 through AEM 5.6.0, these are the collab components which stored UGC in the local repository using replication as a means of synchronizing UGC across platforms. Other differences involve the implementation using Java Server Pages (JSP) and the blog feature consisting of authoring only in the author environment.

Gen 2: From AEM 5.6.1 through AEM 6.1, this is a mix of collab and social components. AEM 6.0 introduced the new social component framework (SCF) and AEM 6.2 introduced a common UGC store where UGC is accessed using a storage resource provider (SRP).

Gen 3: From AEM 6.2 onwards, there are only social components, implemented in SCF as Handlebars (HBS) components requiring a choice of SRP for UGC.