We’ve recently upgrade a similar large site from EE1 > EE3.
Briefly what we did:
STAGE 1 - TEST UPGRADE
- we had to replace some EE1 addons with EE2 equivalents - make notes on things we needed to do during this part of the upgrade
- we had to replace some EE2 addons with EE3 equivalents - make notes on things we needed to do during this part of the upgrade
The important part of this process is to document changes to 3rd party addons, tweaks to template code and how to resolve any other issues.
Obviously, and like your case, the data on the live/dev sites will become out of sync.
STAGE 2 - FINAL UPGRADE
The final step would to close the live site for a couple of hours (maybe at a quite time like overnight or at the weekend), copy the site + DB to a development area, then reapply the whole upgrade. Assuming you documented all the changes you should sail through this quite easily.
Once all is good copy your files and DB to your live server and reopen it.
Rob, why not just copy upgraded site on dev server back to production? That’s what I do. I just change the name of the db on the dev site, add another subdomain on production, and upload upgraded dev site, and get the install running there. Then switch the upgraded subdomain to being the live home subdomain.
@wildrock, my guess is that since the site is constantly being updated that the content would not be current on the dev site that has been upgraded. You would either have to re-enter any content that was posted since the site was last backed up for moving to dev environment, or put a freeze on the live site content updates, and perform the upgrades.
@rtsgdr Do you have a lot of third-party plugins in use. If yes, upgrading/replacing those will probably be the toughest part. You won’t know until you move the site to a dev server and research the plugin’s upgrade history and try to upgrade everything.
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