Website Development and Migration - What to use?

[Tazzi]

This is something I have struggled finding much information on, or at least I must be searching incorrectly.

Basically I want to be able to have an identical clone of my own website running either on a subdomain or even on my local computer while I do a full website overhaul and then reload this onto the live site.

Where it starts to get a bit hazy, is re-uploading the website back to the live site.
My issue is that if people were to make purchases during this time, this would be wiped out when the beta site gets uploaded to the live site. My only thought is to possibly put the website on hold while doing this, but that then rushes the process which I am trying to avoid.

Is there a smarter way around this?

[antus]

What I would do, is backup the web content and the database like normal, then restore that on to your own computer. Then do the update locally. Document the process. Then schedule your own outage in production, at a low usage time. Shut down the site, then do the backup, then do the update live and turn it on again. You should be able to get it done in about 30 mins when you have a known good process and your own step by step instructions to run through. If you have problems you didnt see in your test, you can attempt to work through them and if it goes too pear shaped you can restore your initial backup while you think about it and plan to try again later.

depending on how your website works you might be able to put up a downtime page, or a different index.html with just an image and a notice of when the site will be back while you do the update in the background. that page wont need the db, so you should be able to run the update in the background.

[Tazzi]

What I would do, is backup the web content and the database like normal, then restore that on to your own computer. Then do the update locally. Document the process. Then schedule your own outage in production, at a low usage time. Shut down the site, then do the backup, then do the update live and turn it on again. You should be able to get it done in about 30 mins when you have a known good process and your own step by step instructions to run through. If you have problems you didnt see in your test, you can attempt to work through them and if it goes too pear shaped you can restore your initial backup while you think about it and plan to try again later.

depending on how your website works you might be able to put up a downtime page, or a different index.html with just an image and a notice of when the site will be back while you do the update in the background. that page wont need the db, so you should be able to run the update in the background.

Ok not a bad idea, so write out everything that gets done on the beta site, and then do it all to the live site all in one hit which 'should' be pretty quite.

Oh this is gonna be one hell of shit storm

[Gampy]

IMNSHO That is the ONLY way to do it!

Don't forget (be prepared) to adjust/account for hardware differences between systems if necessary.

[Tazzi]

Its all going to be running on the same server again, its more the fact I wanted to make as many changes as possible in the shortest time frame so the website is not down.

I have been researching some more, and I 'think' I can save/update the ecommerce database tables separately to that of the main wordpress tables. So I should be able to update the beta site with any new orders to keep it up to date until I move it to the live site. Then fingers crossed it all works straight away!

[Gampy]

The 7 P's of success ... Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance!

Do it over and over and over till you get it down, then and only then you do the live system ...

You may still possibly have issues, however the more you did it over and over the more prepared you are, thus the faster you'll recover.

Love doing that crap, did it for a long time.

[Tazzi]

Last time I did a massive overhaul.. I waited till around middnight.. and did all the changes live on the site. Didnt sleep until 6am... pretty sure I still have PTSD from that traumatic night.

What could go wrong... did go wrong. Hopefully this will be a hell of a lot less pain.

[Gampy]

Oh gawd I hate those nights! Feel for ya ... Been there done that!

Not only is working in a panic traumatizing, it returns poor results, you will invariably miss some important bit.