I have been pondering on the best approach for changing an existing website for one developed in Elements.
One thought I had was to
create a subfolder,
develop the site there and when all the testing and QA has been completed,
configure a redirection to a page that informs a user that the site is currently under maintenance,
erase the existing site from the server,
copy the new site to the root folder,
test the site to make sure things are working as expected
and then remove the redirection.
One of the issues I have is that the existing site uses a number of explicit addresses for certain content. I suppose that I could leave that content (and not erase it) and then change the addresses to relative rather than explicit in the new Elements site.
What has the approach been from others when changing from RW Classic to Elements? I am interested to hear from other’s experiences.
I believe it depends on the complexity. In my case, one site contains hundreds of documents, thousands of photos amongst many other items. In the case of many documents, they are currently referenced via direct web addresses and photos are divided up into many folders using Stacks to manage their display. There are also lists of addresses stored in csv files that allow those addresses to be displayed via Stacks as well.
I went the easy way which is similar to your list but without all the redirects. I kept the RWC site live while I played around with the new and improved replica made in Elements. I published the Elements site to a hidden subdomain and had a couple of people look and make comments, follow links etc and then when everyone was happy I deleted all of the RW generated files on my host server and replaced them with the exported Elements site. My first tip would be to do this bit in the morning rather than just before you go to bed because you will notice something wrong as soon as you do it.
My RWC sites were pretty basic in the scheme of things with a bit of additional code and a handful of stacks. In the end as I played around with Elements and realised how much it could do out of the box my replica site was no longer a replica but a totally new layout. That would be my second tip, don’t let yourself be restrained by your RW layout.
I was porting over my website https://weaverpixel.com more than a year ago. It had at that time around 20…25 pages and some of the pages I wanted to keep, but without any changes for the future. These pages are shop pages where external shops were linking to.
For the porting I cannot recommend enough to use the “Import Classic Project”. It is importing the complete content with all the assets, the page structure, the export settings and your meta data. After the import I replaced then page by page with the Elements pages. The old shopping pages are still existing here but they are set to “Do not publish” so all the “old” content is still online.
That sounds like a good approach. I had not thought about the ‘Do not publish’ for certain pages. How did you do all your testing as you would not want to publish top the same location until everything was tested. Also, wouldn’t you have a lot of superfluous files still there if you publish over the top of the previous environment?
I was doing exactly like this . After the import and setting all pages to “Not Publish” I deleted every imported old content under Hompage and developed my new one with Elements. I was not publishing til the Homepage was ready (only previews). Before publishing I made a Backup from the entire site. Then I was doing the same page by page - some stays unchanged till today and I am maintaining them if necessary with Classic - also here the pages created with Elements are set to “Not Publish”. Works great without issues so far. At the beginning I did quite a lot Backups before every publishing - in the meantime very rarely.
Yeah, that’s probably a disadvantage of this method. But server space is cheap nowadays and I renamed the folder name of the Elements created pages into “xyz-elements”. After I got it working I deleted “xyz” and “xyz-elements” on the server, renamed “xyz-elements” back to “xyz” and thus getting a relative clean site.
. After the import and setting all pages to “Not Publish” I deleted every imported old content under Hompage and developed my new one with Elements. I was not publishing til the Homepage was ready (only previews). Before publishing I made a Backup from the entire site. Then I was doing the same page by page - some stays unchanged till today and I am maintaining them if necessary with Classic - also here the pages created with Elements are set to “Not Publish”. Works great without issues so far. At the beginning I did quite a lot Backups before every publishing - in the meantime very rarely.