drastically changing the back end.

[halfasleeps]

I the website I have been working on for the last couple years is now growing out of itself.

basically in order to able to do all the things and keep track of all the things we want the website to be able to....the internal structure really needs to be changed quite a bit.

I am worried about making major changes like this because I don't want to break anything.


So my question is this, how do you go about a major back end over-haul while making sure nothing breaks during the transition?


Thanks

[graedus_dave]

Duplicate the website and the database elsewhere and work on the duplicate.

[halfasleeps]

Duplicate the website and the database elsewhere and work on the duplicate.

Good idea, The website hosted by a hosting company. I could create a duplicate here one of of our own servers...but I dont know how to make sure all the apache/php configurations match the hosts?

Thanks!

[graedus_dave]

If it's a big enough deal and you have enough of a margin to cover this, I would just get a 2nd account with that hosting company and develop there, so everything is identical. If that's not possible, just find out the Apache version (available on error message IIRC) and the PHP versions and match that on your local servers. Obviously you'll develop it on your local servers anyway, it's just nice to be able to test it in an identical environment befre going live.

We develop locally with XAMPP -- it supports apache, PHP4 and 5, mysql, etc -- and then upload to our servers and test there. We have a VPS account, so we just have to create another account for ourselves.