Mirrored web site

[keat]

Every year around this time, I start working on price changes and adding new products, only instead of doing these on the live site, I have an exact mirror.

Then on January 1st, I copy over a small number of tables from the mirror to the live database. (images I've already ftp'd)

This was reletively easy and painless on my V3 site, but now I'm V6.

This is the first time I will have done this on V6.

 

Of course, V6 has a lot more tables, some of which are interlinked, options top/mid/bottom have gone, images have file indexing, seo tables, it's gotten a whole more complex.

So rather than swapping tables that my changes may have modified, I wonder if it might be easier to swap the whole database, and then restore only the tables related to customers and orders ?

 

Any thoughts ?

[bsmither]

Please consider this approach: only admins can see out-of-stock products (if hidden). Thus, you can add the new products without the customer being aware of them.

(Products can also be disabled but those are currently hidden from customer and admin, and can be made unavailable for purchase but can still be seen.)

Let me see what it would take to make disabled products still show on the storefront (if hide-out-of-stock won't work).

But otherwise, 'featured prices' are in different tables (quantity prices and customer group prices).

 

[keat]

The new lines are not so much of an issue, as some of these will go live on the web site as they come in to stock, of course some won't.

Every year, we have a new catalogue with lots of price changes both up and down.

The boss is set in his ways, price changes have to happen on the 1st of January, not a day before, not a day later.

This work can take any thing up to a month to complete, so the only way to do the chanage over in a day is to work on another database.

 

[T3rry]

maybe you could clone the item and then just disable the old one and re-enable the new one on the date required

[Dirty Butter]

He needs to be able to have all the order and customer related entries up-to-date at the time of changing to the mirror database. I have a test site with current code, but all order, customer, and item entries made on the live site since the creation of the test site are missing.

 

[bsmither]

My thoughts on making changes to 'price', 'sale_price', and 'cost_price'. (It will be tricky to do this for Group Prices and Quantity Prices.)  All this should be able to be done in phpMyAdmin.

1. Copy the CubeCart_inventory table to Copy_CubeCart_inventory.
2. Make all the changes to the 'price', 'sale_price', and 'cost_price' columns in the copy.
3. When the time comes, execute the following SQL query in phpMyAdmin:

UPDATE `CubeCart_inventory` AS I, `Copy_CubeCart_inventory` AS C
SET
  I.price = C.price
, I.sale_price = C.sale_price
, I.cost_price = C.cost_price
WHERE
I.product_id = C.product_id;

You can use CubeCart's admin to add new products to the existing store, just set the Status to unchecked.

Disclaimer: these are only thoughts as I have not actually made any experiments doing this using CC6 (CC3, yes, lots of times).