CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Scott - The easiest would be if I could do a wholesale copy of the new site (helpredesign) and overwrite the existing help.commons. This would involve:
1. Getting an export of the helpredesign.commons database tables
2. Modifying them to point to the help.commons database table prefix
3. Overwriting help.commons with the database export (after backups, of course)
4. In the new help.commons, replace helpredesign.commons URLs with help.commons URLs
5. Sync over any uploads from helpredesign.commons to help.commons

This process limits the possibility of missed or mangled settings that might result from trying to move over individual bits of configuration. However, it requires that all content from help.commons exist on helpredesign.commons, so that it's still there when we copy helpredesign back to help. Is this the case?

If we can't do it this way, I'll investigate setting up a third site (a clone of help.commons) to see if I can move the helpredesign config over piecemeal.

Hi Boone - Thanks for all the information. The redesign changes that I made consisted of only 1 page (which I copied over to the live site yesterday and fixed the links) and the header and footer template parts, as well as two templates. Maybe it is easier for me to just copy these over manually? If I did this, would the templates on the old site clash with the ones I copy over?

Hi Boone - Thanks for all the information. The redesign changes that I made consisted of only 1 page (which I copied over to the live site yesterday and fixed the links) and the header and footer template parts, as well as two templates. Maybe it is easier for me to just copy these over manually? If I did this, would the templates on the old site clash with the ones I copy over?

Ah. Well, it looks to me like the existing CAC Help theme is not a block theme. As such, it doesn't have any templates or template parts of the sort that Twenty Twenty-Two does (ie, posts of the post type wp_template or wp_template_part). So I don't see how there would be any conflicts. The thing I'd be concerned about is settings that don't live in templates - like changes to Styles in Dashboard > Appearance > Editor - that might not be copied over in such an obvious way.

What would you say about cloning help.commons to a new test site, then attempting to "update" it to the same configuration as helpredesign.commons?

Hi - That sounds good, but would that mean the Help site would have a different URL? Or could you do something to fix that? We have a lot of posts that link to the Help site that might get broken.

The test site would exist only to give you a dry run at the migration. So you'd set up helptest.commons as a clone of help.commons; then you'd manually port your changes from helpredesign.commons to helptest.commons; then you'd test to make sure everything looks good. If so, then you repeat the same steps to port the changes from helpredesign.commons to help.commons. helptest.commons could then be discarded.

Got it. I will give it a shot.

I am certainly glad I tried this. It is more complicated than I thought. When I switched the cloned copy over to Twenty-twenty two, I found two major issues that I didn't encounter when I just exported/imported to a site with the 2022 theme activated: (1) the Default template - originally, I added a new template called "Page" and 2022 automatically associated the old "Default theme" (from the import) to the new "Page" template - that didn't work on the clone; and (2) in the "Page" template, I originally added a sidebar that displays one of four menus, controlled by the page's category (a "visibility" template option) - that didn't work on the clone - the visibility option was not there.

I also found that switching back to the original, custom theme didn't work. All the links just resolved to the home page. That was good to know (or not good to know :)).

https://helpredesign.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
https://clonedhelp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

I'm thinking the easiest way around all this is to create a new site called https:// support .commons.gc.cuny.edu/ and export/import content, make the template changes, and as soon as everything looks good, make the switch from https:// help .commons.gc.cuny.edu/ to https:// support .commons.gc.cuny.edu/.

Well, I'd hoped that the clone process would make this smooth, but I'm not surprised to hear it doesn't work properly. I guess it's good you tested to find this out.

I'm thinking the easiest way around all this is to create a new site called https:// support .commons.gc.cuny.edu/ and export/import content, make the template changes, and as soon as everything looks good, make the switch from https:// help .commons.gc.cuny.edu/ to https:// support .commons.gc.cuny.edu/.

This sounds correct to me. Let me know as you get this set up and tested, and I'll coordinate to make the URL switch.