Best upgrading practices for CB, GJ & Subs and all their Addons and extras

Hi
I'd like to confirm what the best methods and practices are for keeping CB, GJ and CBSubs and all their addons and extras updated and in sync with the latest versions of everything.

It seems every Joomlapolis email I get mentions something new and it's very hard to keep track of everything.

There are so many individual parts of the whole CB collection that it becomes very difficult to know what is what, and what has been updated or not. Is there some easy method for checking and updating everything that I so far have been missing?

When I setup a J2.5 site a few months ago, I used the CB Packager and selected everything CB & GJ related and installed the lot in one easy install. A couple of weeks ago I spent ages going through everything again trying to see what was needing updating or what was new and tried to familiarise myself yet again with everything (it does get very complicated keeping track of what's what!).

What I'm wondering, is updating everything easier (or best) if I just select everything again in CB packager (including the core again) and then just reinstalling the whole lot in one go using the standard Joomla installer?

Of course this would only be sensible if I haven't tweaked or hacked anything in the CB & Addon files, but I assume all my settings and configurations would remain as set prior to updating/reinstall. So, if everything installs without problems all should work as before?

Or should I just be manually going through everything part by part? Checking dates and versions by going into each thing individually (very, very time consuming!)?

Any guidance please as I notice in the downloads section a few things already that have new dates and ideally I don't want to spend another few hours going through everything (again!).

Many thanks

Edit: (NB I have just realised I may have initially installed everything via CB Quickstart PRO and since used CB Packager to update - I can't quite remember>

You can use quickstart pro or the packager and just install everything again. You'll lose any core changes you made though. Settings and database tables will remain intact though so you won't lose any data, but always be on the cautious side of things and create a backup before upgrading. Also note our packager ignores RC/Beta releases so GJ 2.7rc1 needs to be downloaded separately (I'm working on implementing a version dropdown to the package builder).

Aside from that you could just download files individually and upgrade only what has changed as all our projects give their date and version numbers in their backend displays or descriptions.

We will be significantly improving this with a later release of CB (likely CB 2.0).

You'll lose any core changes you made though

I take it you mean if I've altered anything in the code rather than settings?

We will be significantly improving this with a later release of CB (likely CB 2.0).

That will be a relief! Currently we have to trawl through each download section, examining each one and comparing it with each one on our websites. It's a long task!

Thanks for your reply.

I take it you mean if I've altered anything in the code rather than settings?

Yup.

That will be a relief! Currently we have to trawl through each download section, examining each one and comparing it with each one on our websites. It's a long task!

We'd like to have backend version checking for all our plugins. This is just an idea, but we'd like for admins to be able to download and install updates directly from CB backend; again, just an idea at this point.