Upgrading a site from 1.x to 2.x - how to merge back into production?

Question

I am upgrading and redesigning a mid-size, member-driven site from 1.7 to 2.5. I have created a local development environment and upgraded it successfully. Work on the updated templates and so on is happening right now. The question I have is: what will be the best way to merge my changes back into the production site? Obviously, there are database changes between 1 and 2, as well as template tag changes. I will also need to install new add-ons and make other changes that affect the database. Is there any better way to handle this than by manually merging each DB table when I finish? That will work, but it's going to be a huge pain. How have other people handled combination upgrade/redesigns on live sites?

Answer 1

Typically speaking there's two ways to handle this, in both, you do what you've done and run through the upgrade once to get all of it working, templates working, etc. Then you do one of the following:

1. Take the site offline, run through the upgrade again to update the database and all content. Then copy over your files from the previous upgrade, run any add-on installs and changes you need to, and bring the site back online.
2. Or, take the site offline, run through the upgrade again but use your previous upgrade as the 'master' version, and copy over any new data and members from the newly upgraded site to your master version, then re-launch that one.

I really wouldn't recommend trying to merge tables from the EE1 to the EE2 site, that will just be a mess. On the other hand, there isn't really a super clean way to launch a 1-2 upgrade on a site with a lot of content coming in.