Is it necessary to replace the default 2009 template building blocks with those of 2011?

Question

We are currently migrating from SDL Tridion 2009 to 2011 SP1. As far as templating goes we only had 1 issue which had to do with the default Outbound Email TBB's and that issue was easily solved by updating the old 2009 default Outbound Email TBB's with the new ones.

We haven't had any other issues yet.

Is it necessary to update all the template to start using the new 2011 default template building blocks? It's obviously good practice to keep everything up-to-date, but are there any changes in logic too?

Answer 1

The Default Template Building Blocks are physically located in an assembly in the GAC; after an upgrade of Tridion this assembly will have been automatically upgraded as well.

Some things are however not located in the assembly; the parameter schemas and DWT TBBs would not have been updated (assuming they need updating of course).

This essentially leaves you with with only one concern when it comes to updating the Default Template Building Blocks:

• Any update to the parameter schemas will most likely however constitute a breaking change to the Default Template Building Blocks API (your existing templates using these would have to be updated to use parameters from the updated schemas).

Because of this concern my advice would be to leave the original Default Template Building Blocks in place (remember that their underlying assembly and code are updated regardless!); if any breaking changes were made in the Default Template Building Blocks this should be listed in the release notes (and a regression test of your implementation would reveal these as well).

Edit: I've updated my answer because as Frank pointed out the existing TBBs can be overridden automatically by (re)installing the TBBs to the same parent folder. As such upgrading the TBBs is essentially a non-issue effort wise!

I've also added the DWT TBBs to the list of items that will not be updated through the assembly as Chris pointed out.