So I recently started doing web development for a great non-profit, Team Rubicon, which unites the skills and experiences of military veterans with first responders to rapidly deploy emergency response teams. Pretty boss. Unfortunately, the site is a bit of a mess.
It’s currently running WordPress 4.2.7 with Sage 6.5.2, which was released super recently in…Feburary 2014
The site was put together a while back by an agency, which seriously underbid the hours and so cut corners to save time/money by hard-coding most of the unique pages, so they don’t have actual editable fields in WP Admin. Then prior to me, two freelancers came in and made updates to content/functionality, and frankensteined some more code into the site.
The site is hosted on Media Temple’s DV hosting service, running CentOS 6.5, Apache 2.2, PHP 5.4, and MySQL 5.5.
For various reasons - security, compatibility, future-proofing, site speed, etc. - I want to refactor the site to run on Bedrocks, update the theme to the current version of Sage, update WP Core to 4.5.1, and update the server stack to PHP7/MariaDB/Apache 2.4/maybe ngnix.
Obviously, this is a large undertaking, and there are multiple interdependent pieces that might work when they are updated but break after another part gets updated.
So my question isn’t technical, but this: if you were in my shoes, how would you approach this problem? What would you do first? Update the server, then WP Core, then convert to Bedrock, then fix theme? Or fix theme, then WP Core, then Bedrock, then server? Or just say fuck it, and dump the DB, rebuild the theme from scratch, and start on a fresh server & Bedrock build? Whatever the path, I’ll be doing it on a staging server first so I’m not concerned with downtime during the process.
I’d like to also have Trellis in the mix, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to switch the production server from CentOS to Ubuntu, so I’m not focused on that part at the moment.
I appreciate any insights, thoughts, experiences, etc. that might help me out. Cheers!