Keeping two versions of CMS on same domain

Keeping two versions of Joomla CMS website on the same domain

[Das Capitolin]

I've got a tricky decision that's been bothering me, and I think the decision is best served with the WW crowd...

For the past three years, I have operated a Joomla website that produces massive amounts of content. To date we have 10K unique content items, and 150K URL's. Our traffic is in the area of 700K monthly uniques, and 10M monthly pageviews. In summary, it's an established site with good traffic and high trust/page-rank URLs.

Now comes the problem: we want to keep the old site online at the same domain to maintain traffic, while launching a new version of the website to help us remain competitive. For reference, the current (old) site uses Joomla 1.0.15 and we're preparing to launch the new version of our site based on Joomla 1.5.x.

I am considering several options, such as creating the new version in a sub-domain (such as v2), and keeping the old domain root as-is, but then I have to figure out how to have root domain visitors go to the new subdomain while (old) link visitors stay on the old domain. I've also considered moving the old root content to a sub-domain, and somehow devising a 301 to forward individual URLs to the new location.

Here are some specifics: the old site creates pages like /index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=999&Itemid=99 whereas the new site creates URLs like /index.php/news/news-topic

What I'm looking for is some guidance, since I know several of you have done this exact same thing many times.

[phranque]

i don't know joomla specifically well enough to answer how but there should be a way to use urls without the index script such as /news/news-topic and i would suggest that as an improvement in the url to start with.
then it should be a simple matter to internally rewrite any url that starts with /index.php to a subdirectory where you have joomla 1.0.15 installed.

having said that i'm wondering how your navigation will work with separate databases and two cms's generating internal links.
another consideration is if you have any user registration function you will have problems there.

also what are the support and security implications of remaining on 1.0.15?

you may want to consider migrating your content to the newer version first and then adding content.
of course that may introduce another problem with changing urls schemes mid-stream or dealing with a large scale redirection scheme.

[Das Capitolin]

Thank you for your response phranque, but I fear that my post was not clear.

We have one CMS with thousands of established links, and want to keep them alive as we establish a new CMS. The content won't be migrated (10,000 items is too time intensive), and doing so would change the URL's (of which there are 150,000).

So what I want to do is keep my existing Joomla site, and establish a new Joomla site making the old one into an archive with the same URLs.

[phranque]

actually i understood your post quite clearly.

the first part of my response addressed in a cursory manner how you could technically establish a new joomla site and maintain the existing site as an archive, while pointing out that your suggested new url structure contains an unnecessary element.

the remainder of my response addressed the issues that will ensue from having mutliple cms's including a legacy version.

all in my humble opinion, of course.
=8)

[travelin cat]

What we did was upgrade our 1.0 site to a new SEO plug-in that converted all of those crappy index.php? urls to proper urls first. The SE's spider our site furiously. The spidering actually helped our serps as all of the old pages became 404 and the new ones began to appear in about 2 days.

We are still developing the 1.5 version and hope to make it live shortly.

I'm not sure you would want to have two sites live at the same time. I know it can be scary to make changes (we have been putting this off for a very long time) but it really has to be done sooner or later.

[Das Capitolin]

Thank you cat, the problem is that we have thousands of in-links from affiliate web sites, and I don't want to lose those referrals.

[travelin cat]

I see. That does create a problem. The SEO software we use allows you to create 301's for each page. It sounds like that would be a huge task for you.

[baileytech]

not sure why you didnt use a sef component for 1.0 to start with ? 1.5 is a big step up from ver 1.0 and its not an easy task to move content from 1.0 to 1.5, but surely thats all you can do in the long run aint it ?

[ergophobe]

I've tried to run a new drupal site over an old site. It's a pain in the butt and this was a site with probably one tenth the content and traffic that you have.

I think it will be similar with Joomla or any CMS that redirects everything through index.php and counts on index.php being the default directory index.

Unless you're going to segregate the new site off to a subdirectory or subdomain, it's going to be problematic, and you're basically stuck with static navigation or writing some bridge script that can build navigation by drawing from both databases.

Just curious - how do 10K unique content items create 150K URLs? I'm having trouble visualizing that. Is it because of user accounts, category pages and things like that which don't count as "content"? Or is it more like 10K product pages with customized landing pages depending on what an affiliate wants to show?

Basically, what I'm trying to figure out is whether some of them don't really matter. In other words, you may have tons of inbound affiliate links, but presumably none of them would go to, say, a member profile page (just throwing that out - no idea what kind of site this is). I'm guessing a large percentage of those 150K URLs are non-critical and redirecting 1000 of them would cover 95% or more of your traffic.

[Das Capitolin]

The website has many articles that span up to twenty pages, and the dynamic ULR's change with each new page. I could probably get away with only the primary article URL, which has grown to 11,000 now.

Ultimately, I decided to wait on Joomla 1.6. The new version can detect bad URLs and allow you to map them to URLs on the new CMS.

[ergophobe]

Ah, okay. So that is complicated no matter how you cut it. :-(