Magento - Journey to 1.4 - Tutorial for Upgrading Magento to Version 1.4

I had a terribly difficult time upgrading Magento 1.3 to 1.4. I am not sure if this is because of the customizations I have made, the size of my database, but I am banking on it being the monstrosity of Magento and its quirkiness. Following is the path I chose to take when the simple upgrading process failed for my magento store.

Instead of performing an upgrade on Magento Connect or simply using a filesystem upgrade to upgrade the database I chose to build a new Magento installation and use profile importing to rebuild the store. These were my steps. I completed them on a local xxamp server and then moved them over to our web server on a subdirectory, and once it was working to my liking i copied it over to root to go live. Make sure your current site stays live so you can export data and copy settings from it.

1. create a completely new database, and a user with all access permissions for that db, write down the info
1. note - most apps will add prefix_ to your db, make sure you write that down for your connectivity
2. create folder for installation
3. download latest version of magento 1.4 and place into installation folder
4. use browser to open site and run installation wizard
5. go into category manager and add categories matching your old site
1. you will need to go into your old site and pull the entity_id from the table catalog_category_entity to make sure your new category ids match the old so your products import properly
6. add all of your custom attributes along with any options for dropdown values
7. build your attribute sets based on your old sites attribute sets
8. go into your configurations and copy all the settings from your old site
9. readd your static blocks
10. readd your cms pages
11. edit the 1.4 skin to match your old skin - note old css files will no longer work so you will have to rebuild your skin - replace images you have changed, and use the style.css under css subfolder to manipulate your site's skin
12. test your skin and apply it to the site
13. go through your new website bug testing and checking for theme problems to make sure its exactly how you will want it
14. add any tweaks to your code that you may have done - perhaps on the design in app... please note old design tweaks will probably not work and your new site. recode as necessary
15. add any extensions you will need - note many old extensions will no longer work
16. if you are using aw_blog add it in, and import posts, cats, and postcats tables into your sql db using phpmyadmin
17. at this point i uploaded my files and database to the live host subdirectory to prepare for the launch to new live site
18. working with permissions - i have found many of our install problems have been permission based -  you should safely be able to set all directories to 755 and files to 644. with the exception of 
1. /media should be set to 775 
2. /var should be set to 775
3. /app/etc/ should be set to 775
4. /app/etc/local.xml should be set to 664
5. /var/.htaccess should be set to 664
19. add category images and meta information for seo and display purposes
20. copy all shopping cart rules to new site
21. copy all tax rules and tables to new site
22. if you need to increase max_execution time - use a php.ini instead of .htaccess .htaccess doesnt always work
23. copy the contents of your /media/catalog/products on your old install to your /media/import on your new install (use file transfer on your server as ftp will ruin your images with losing capitalizations)
24. use this module hack to export products with all product images from the old site:
1. download the files from http://www.foowebs.com/apps/foowebsMagentoExporter.zip
2. copy the files to your old install of magento
3. after installing the files and clearing your cache you should run the export profile for all products and the resulting csv should include a column for add_images
25. use this module hack to import products with all product images from old site:
1. download the files from http://www.foowebs.com/apps/foowebsFullImport.zip
2. copy the files to your new install of magento
3. after installing the files clear your cache, and run the import all products profile locating the file you just exported with the other module
26. your products should now be all imported, you will probably need to go to configuration, index management and reindex your site, also go to cache management and clear your cache
27. at this point i would take some runs through the site to make sure everything is working properly
28. copy your email templates from the old website to the new
29. create a test order on the new website to make sure ordering functions properly
30. clear all cache on old install and new
31. ask your host administrator to run a backup on file structure and dbs so you can restore if necessary
32. take any backups you can of your own
33. at this point you should use your cpanel to move all the root files to a subdirectory and move the subdirectory containing your new install to the public_html root
34. test the new site out - clearing cache and checking permissions if its not viewing properly
35. pray :)