Site needs revamping - need your feedback

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burningwater

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Mar 1, 2010
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I have a site that's 10 years old. It started as coding experiment, where I would test my php skills and develop little useful (at the time) scripts, forms, databases, etc.

My site has a blog, forum, pages, custom sections and all this stuff is one giant pain in the butt hack, to be honest.

The problem is that my site is getting more and more traffic, and it's getting harder and harder to maintain. I need to migrate to a new system. I am thinking WordPress.

So, when you set up a new site, would you for each of the 600+ pages, create a new page, copy and paste from the old site (may include reuploading all images being used) and reformat, etc? It would take weeks to do this, page by page. Maybe I can outsource it?

Each of these pages get decent search engine traffic too. Google loves me, so I don't want 600 broken links, when the new site goes up.

How to deal with this? Spend serious amounts of time making 303 redirects in .htaccess?

I could perhaps just start a new WP section under something like /newhome/ or something, and leave all the old stuff as is, and try to get people to go to the new section by having big links in old design's header, or something.

Anywhoo, looking for some ideas and suggestions guys and gals! :bowdown:
 


if you're good with coding and your old site is database driven you probably can write a script to automatically copy the data from your old database to a new one and to generate redirects in .htaccess
 
If they are static pages, you should be fine.

The .htaccess directives that wordpress uses for permalinks only show wordpress if the request is not an existing file or directory.
 
My current site is database driven. I can probably write a script that copies data from the old database to the new, but I'm not sure about creating the new pages, how to name them automatically (and in a SEO friendly manner).
 
Well it all really depends on how it's built. I'm not a Wordpress expert (I use Drupal) but I'm sure you can name each of your pages accordingly to match. If they have some weird GET vars you can probably handle this in Wordpress too. It just depends on what the old URLs are, the type of pages they are, the organization, etc, etc.

And as far as data migration I would see if you could write something to transfer it all via PHP or just hire somebody to migrate it all manually for cheap. I have migrated a few larger sites in my day and with proper planning it usually goes pretty smooth. Set up a beta subdomain and replicate your whole site over on the new CMS. Good luck.
 
My current site has some sections where the slug ends with a slash, and some sections where the slug ends with .php, so I figure removing those extensions on the new site, and then doing 303 redirects accordingly would be the best choice?
 
burningwater said:
How to deal with this? Spend serious amounts of time making 303 redirects in .htaccess?
Click to expand...

Those will only get you to Barman's house.

I've never done this, but you could try uploading your old content into the Wordpress DB, auto-assigning post-IDs as you go (have your script keep track of the old URL and the new post ID).

Next, go into wp-admin and turn on permalinks, which I believe will just take the value of 'title' and replace spaces with dashes, giving you permalinks.

Then just add directives in your .htaccess before the Wordpress section to redirect your old pages to the ?p=ID URLs originally in Wordpress, which will in turn get rewritten to the slug-based URLs (you can probably just have your script echo-out the format and then you can copy/paste to your .htaccess).
 
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