Plan for Hot-Migrating All Pages to New Templates

CM1
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Hello!

We’re hoping to migrate all of our content to new templates. However, the process will take several days at least, and we don’t have a staging server. I’m trying to decide on the best way to migrate while keeping the website up and running. The new templates are significantly different from the old, so we would need to change over each page individually.

One idea I had:

  1. Make a copy of the published site directory on our web server as a back-up.
  2. Copy our site instance in CM1.
  3. Migrate each page in the new instance over to a new template, all the while updating and publishing the original instance as normal.
  4. When the copied site instance is ready:
  • Change the hostname of the original instance to something different (www.example.com-old).
  • Change the hostname of the copied instance to what the hostname of the original instance was.
  1. Configure the new instance so that it is ready to publish to our web server.
  2. Run a full publish on the new instance.

Does this sound like a bad idea? Thank a lot!

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Hi Joseph.

To make sure I understand what you’re talking about - “migrate all of our content” - are you referring to non-Percussion (like WordPress or non-CMS like HTML/CSS) or Percussion pages? 

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Sorry, Aaron, the pages we would be migrating are Percussion pages. We would be changing the templates on these pages to brand new templates, and transferring any widget content that we can over, such as Rich Text Widget content. In addition, the web server and directory to publish to are the same. Thanks!

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Don’t you mean this https://community.percussion.com/percussion/topics/change-1000-pages-to-new-template-at-once-solutio…

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Hi Joseph,

As long as the Region and Widget names in the Old and New Templates match, the Content Match feature should migrate the content to the right places when you use the Change Template feature. 

-n

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Region = ID, correct? If it does not match then you can easily tweak / update the region to match it?

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Yes, the region name is the id of the div.  If they don’t match, then the existing content will get moved to Unused Assets on the Page. 

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This is extremely helpful to know. Thank you for bringing this up!

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Thanks for the info, Nate and Aaron!

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Hi, guys, just double-checking on something. I understand that if I set things up correctly, Content Match will move my old content into the appropriate places in the new templates. But will my plan to migrate content over a long period of time while still maintaining our live website work?

  1. Make a copy of the published site file directory on our web server as a back-up.
  2. Copy our site instance in CM1. Name the copy "www.example.com-new".
  3. Over the course of a few weeks, migrate each page in the new instance over to a new template, while continuing to update and maintain the original instance as a live site, as normal.
  4. When the pages in the new site instance are all migrated to new templates:
  • Change the name of the original instance to "www.example.com-old".
  • Change the name of the new instance to what the name of the original instance was.
  1. Configure the new instance so that it is ready to publish to our web server in the same directory that the old instance published to.
  2. Run a full publish on the new instance.

Thanks!!

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