BetterPHP

As you may or may not know at some point in the near (ish) future I want to move the forum to a new server and set it up using the forum software I am developing. I was not expecting there to be anything close to this level of activity on the forum so I was planning on copying all of the data across and being done with it for now. But the problem now is that a lot of people will need to use it quite early on in testing, so the question is how best to do this ?

My ideas so far are to set it up in parallel to phpBB (not using the same database) just for initial testing, then once the more fatal bugs have been squashed the phpBB database can be imported. Alternatively, just risk migration right away, live with the fact that there may be a bit of downtime and try to fix problems quickly.

Both of my method sort of suck so ... thoughts ?

My ideas so far are to set it up in parallel to phpBB (not using the same database) just for initial testing, then once the more fatal bugs have been squashed the phpBB database can be imported.

Seems like the best way to go

I guess something as big as a forum should be implemented in stages.
- First develop and test yourself on a dev server /subdomain.
- Next place it on a test sub domain with its own database and invite a select few to test the hell out of it and report any bugs / problems.
- Sort those bugs and invite those users once more and continue this process until all bugs seemingly are gone.
- Make sure you make very frequent database backups and use the live database (if possible) for your test subdomain and let the users test again.
- Finally migrate to the new software fully and be prepared to solve any errors that arise

A lot of work, yeah, you know what you started....

libeco wrote:- Make sure you make very frequent database backups and use the live database (if possible) for your test subdomain and let the users test again.

My server does a backup every 4 hours of the entire MySQL server so no worries there really.

libeco wrote:- First develop and test yourself on a dev server /subdomain.
- Next place it on a test sub domain with its own database and invite a select few to test the hell out of it and report any bugs / problems.
- Sort those bugs and invite those users once more and continue this process until all bugs seemingly are gone.
- Finally migrate to the new software fully and be prepared to solve any errors that arise

Is basically what I meant by

jacek wrote:set it up in parallel to phpBB (not using the same database) just for initial testing, then once the more fatal bugs have been squashed the phpBB database can be imported

libeco wrote:A lot of work, yeah, you know what you started....

It's a smaller project than my hosting set up

libeco wrote:- Next place it on a test sub domain with its own database and invite a select few to test the hell out of it and report any bugs / problems.

I'd be willing to do that if it means I get to be helpful, or (more importantly), spazzy and random and crazy and stuff!