Website Rebuild - Membership Site w/Active Subscriptions

Support
#1

Hello!

I am seeking advice on how to take an existing Wordpress membership website with many active subscribers that visit the site daily and redesign it using the Pro theme.

The site uses the Member Mouse plugin and after speaking with their support, they say it’s not a problem to just simply redesign it on a development URL and transfer the theme files to the live site, once complete.

But in my experience using the Pro theme, each page gets built in the Cornerstone builder so it’s not as simple as just exporting/importing out the theme files. Or is it?

This is my question. What is the best way to do this redesign?

The option of taking the entire redesigned website and pushing it live won’t work because if it takes me 30 days to build the site, I’ll be missing 30 days of new subscribers and Member Mouse doesn’t have a way to migrate the new users without things breaking.

Fingers crossed on your reply.

Thank you,
William

#2

Hey William,

Thanks for writing in! You can clone your live site into a staging site. This is where you can install the Pro theme, do your site rebuild and then when it is ready, you can easily push all the changes to the live site without having to import/export the pages. There are plugins that lets you do this. You might want to check this out:

Hope this helps.

#3

Just to give my two cents here: this is in fact not an easy task. WordPress is not built for these kinds of operations. This is, IMHO, one of the biggest pain points of WordPress (but also other CMSs as well).

This also a classic problem for every web shop owner who does not want to lose products, orders and customers on a redesign.

I really like to use the WP Staging Pro plugin to easily create staging environments.

You can create a staging website copy from within the plugin. Then work on that STAGING site, and push back your changes to LIVE when you are done. You can even create several staging sites or even a staging from a staging site. In fact, this is kind of a classic development setup: LIVE SITE > STAGING SITE > DEV SITE

The hard task is how to not overwrite your existing users. I used two methods in the past:

Omit Certain Database Tables

In WP Staging, when pushing your updates from staging to live site, you can choose which database tables to omit. The question is, which database tables contains the information, you do not want to push back to live site. In this case, MemberMouse devs should be able to tell you, which tables to omit to not delete any new members on the live site.

But you have to test (!), if this is really working. I.e. example create STAGING and immediately create a DEV site from STAGING. Now create some new dummy members on STAGING. Then do some design changes on DEV. Now push DEV to STAGING (omit the database tables that contain the members’ data) and check if none of the dummy members has been deleted on STAGING. If it is working, this might be the setup to push from STAGING to LIVE on relaunch day.

Manual Export/Import

Another way would be on the day of the relaunch export your members from LIVE, put your LIVE site to maintenance, now push STAGING to LIVE. Now import your members you exported before. Depending on the import process, you need to delete all current members before importing to avoid duplicate members. Maybe Member Mouse has some export/import methods? Or maybe Plugins like WP All Import/Export can help.

Just some basic ideas/concepts on how to possibly achieve this. Again, this is not a trivial task. Good luck and Planckspeed :wink:

#4

Thanks guys!

@ruenel - I was researching these staging plugins and specifically WP Staging Pro. Not sure if it will quite do the site as expected. They mention Files, DB, plugins etc … certain things specifically and I will have to test as Raye mentioned with the multiple step dev approach.

@raye - Without ever having done this before it’s exactly where my train of thought was on this project. And, you seem to have nailed it with regard to my concerns. Thanks for that! Reaching out to Member Mouse for the exclusion tables is brilliant! I have a good rapport with them already.

The other thing I have been concerned with is let’s say it all works as we’re thinking … what about page URLs because of the Cornerstone Builder?

The new site I will use the Pro theme. The existing site is Genesis. So, this means that for each page I will create a new one basically in Pro and build them out. Once I migrate over to production, what happens to all the pages? For SEO I want to keep all the same URLs. What happens to the old pages? Overwritten? That would be good. Just trying to think it through. Probably have to test like with the users as you mentioned. Maybe do one page and migrate to DEV to see how it worked out.

Thanks again for the excellent support and understanding what I’m doing. I now have 2 favorite techs at ThemeCo. Ruenel has been amazing over the years.

Regards,
William

#5

@webraven

I don’t know the Genesis theme. Is it a builder like Themeco? Ore more a classic theme?

If it is a builder I could imagine you cannot run both in parallel? So maybe you must deactivate and uninstall Genesis. Then you should have all your pages still there, but they may all contain some Genesis related gibberish code as content. If you activate Themeco Pro now, you can edit the contents with the Edit with Cornerstone button on each post – that’s how I imagine it, at least.

But I really don’t know how Genesis works, so best would be to give it a try, as you already mentioned before.

BTW: I’m not a Themeco staff member, only a Themeco user who loves and uses Themeco Pro a lot and tries to bring some “community vibes” into the forum by helping out from time to time :wink:

1 Like
#6

@raye - Excellent of you to contribute, I need to do more of this myself! Regarding Genesis, we don’t need both to run in parallel. I love ThemeCo as well, this is why I’m looking to rebuild the site and thereby eliminating the Genesis (theme).

I think this can work. I’m going to start on it on Monday and I’ll come back to this post with the results and to contribute to the community, yahoo!

Thank you both again!

#7

Hi William,

Please let us know if you need any help with this.

Thanks