AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Soon we're going to overhaul our theme at www.nc-software.com with a new web site concept. For those that have redone their AC7 site, what is the best process to go about this while a site is still in production. Unfortunately the work will be beyond just a new theme in AppThemes, it's going to require content changes to product descriptions, etc. We don't want to lose our linkage by creating new product URL's from what's already indexed out there now. While the catalog isn't that great, we could use redirects from old to new if necessary but ideally we'd like to keep our product ID's for multiple reasons, i.e. integrations, licensing, etc.

My plan is obviously to take a copy of the production database and use that as the latest snapshot for dev. I'm interested in any lessons learned or tips on the best way to go about this and then apply the changes back to the production site.

Thx

We did this last year, and I learned a number of things, so hopefully I can be of some assistance.

I started with a copy of my site on my local machine that I could play with freely without messing up the live site. IIS Express and Microsoft SQL Server have free versions and are pretty easy to setup. Alternatively, you could get an internet host for your testing server. I had both, but the only benefit to the internet host over localhost is that you can test the site on multiple computers. For the occasional minor update that I need to make these days, my local testing server is fine.

Getting a version control system in place is VERY helpful. This post: viewtopic.php?f=47&t=10082 outlines the basic steps to setup versioning with SubVersion (SVN). I actually use Mercurial SCM instead of SubVersion as my version control. Since I am the only person developing on this site, I opted for the ease of using Mercurial over the more advanced features of SubVersion. I also didn't branch my repository at all since I was essentially starting from scratch and didn't need to keep any of my previous customizations. I started with a fresh install of AbleCommerce and simply committed all changes to the single trunk.

Once your local testing server is setup, you are free to muck around with anything! Commit changes often, you can always undo them later.

Once you get the site updated on your local machine, you just need to figure out which files to update on the server. The merge feature discussed in the linked post above is probably a good way. For my store, I just had updated themes, conlibs, and root level .aspx files, so I simply deleted old folders and uploaded new ones, but your site may require more in-depth comparing and updating.

I didn't have to change any descriptions or any other data kept in the database, so I won't be very helpful there. Hopefully some sort of database editor or script can make your life easier.

And of course, something will go wrong, so back up your existing site before you make any changes. Update it during a slow time, and take some time after the update to pick through every possible click and make sure it is working the way you want it to work.