What's the best way to switch a live site to a new theme?
Hey Guys,
We are redesigning and restructuring IHSwebDesign.com, and we are trying to figure out the best way to do that.
The new theme has enough variation to it that we can not simply cut over it to it without breaking a bunch of stuff.
The thoughts we are having is to put the site into development mode and work franticly to update everything, or have you make a copy of the live site, import the theme, update the content, and then make the new site live.
We are itching to make the change, and are willing to just take the site down for a day or so, but the main reason we ask is we want to know how to best handle this on a client site.
Thanks,
{th}
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2 Posted by Jonathan Hoyt on 19 Jul, 2011 06:56 PM
Hi Torey, I'm going to outline several options for you.
Create the new theme on your site, build out the theme, and any new fields on the new theme you also add to the templates on the old theme so that they show up in the Manage Content area. Then when you click the preview tab while editing content, you'll see a drop down that lets you preview the content using the new theme without actually activating the theme. This is how Steve did orderedlist.com when we redesigned for the new year.
A bit harder, but you could create a new site, build out the theme there, and then either import the theme to your existing site when you were satisfied, or move content from the existing site over to the new site and then remove the domain from the existing and add it to the new. I'd probably go with importing the theme to the existing site if I was doing and I couldn't do option 1 above.
We do some screen sharing and see how complicated the site you are working on is, and help you decide the best way to move forward.
We realize this isn't a painless process right now and its something we hope to make easier in the future.
3 Posted by Torey Heinz on 19 Jul, 2011 07:15 PM
We created the theme under our "templates" site, imported the theme to our live site, and started playing with the preview view of the new yet inactive theme. What we didn't think of was adding the new "data" to the old theme templates so that we could add the new info while still running the old theme.
We also thought about doing option two, and just copying over the old content. In many ways I like this better because of how much we are re-structuring the site, and the fact that we don't have "much" content now.
Could you do me favor and just copy ihsweb to ihsweb2. I would like to see how it would go if did the work on a clone, switched the domain to it, and deleted the old site.
I could let you know how it goes.
{th}
4 Posted by Jonathan Hoyt on 19 Jul, 2011 07:30 PM
We don't have a copy or clone tool right now, but its something we plan on adding in the future. Is this a blocker for you to move forward right now?
5 Posted by Torey Heinz on 19 Jul, 2011 07:38 PM
Oh, I thought you might be able to do it on your end.
No worries, we'll figure something out. Probably do something like option 1.
Thanks for the response,
{th}
Brandon Keepers closed this discussion on 02 Aug, 2011 05:28 PM.