Liferay 6.0.x to Liferay 6.1 Migration Tips

Following are the important tips

1. Unzip Liferay 6.1 bundle
2. Copy complete data folder as is from Liferay 6.0.x bundle to Liferay 6.1 bundle
3. Take backup of your the database that Liferay 6.0.x points to
4. Drop portal-ext.properties from Liferay 6.0.x to Liferay 6.1 (in ROOT/WEB-INF/classes ofcourse). Essentially you are pointing your new Liferay 6.1 to old database
5. Start Liferay 6.1 and it will automatically detect that it needs to upgrade the database and will run the upgrade scripts. In case there is any exception, you will have to restore the backup of old database and start all over again. Usually the exception is because of missing resource in data folder that the entry in database refers to.
6. If all goes well then your Liferay 6.1 will start successfully with old database upgraded.
7. Check whether you get all your Users and Organizations under "Users & Organizations" in control panel. If not then run - Control Panel >> Server Administration >> Re-Index all Search Indexes

Struts Portlet in plugin project

1. If you have struts portlet in plugin project, on Liferay 6.1, it will throw InvokeFilter Exception and will result in StackOver Flow.
2. Make an entry in liferay-plugin-packages.properties file : liferay-web-xml-enabled=false
3. Be careful while rebuilding the existing services generated using ServiceBuilder. Delete all rows from servicecomponent table and reset the service builder number to 0 and then build services. Liferay keeps a backup of database tables associated with entitties in the service and will rewrite the contents of some of the tables. If you do not want your tables to be overwritten then set  build.auto.upgrade=false in service.properties file in src folder of your plugin project