The WordPress support forums, which include international and
language-specific forums and power support and reviews for WordPress
core, themes, and plugins, had been running on bbPress 1.x since their
inception. Issues with both security and stability were a constant
threat and a move to bbPress 2 was well overdue, but no one was able
to tackle the upgrade. 11 million existing posts spread across more
than twenty sites, custom configurations and plugins written for the
bbPress 1 codebase, and above all, an active userbase and new posts
coming in constantly meant that the project was so unwieldy that it
was hard to know where to begin.
In the summer of 2016, I upgraded the WordPress.org support forums
from bbPress 1 to bbPress 2.x. This talk will be done as an interview
conducted by Mika Epstein.
It will cover the following topics:
– Getting the lay of the land; figure out storage, destination,
sandbox, meta environment.
– Formulating goals: Minimize downtime, clean import, remove spam/dead
topics when possible.
– MVP in terms of forum functionality.
– Native bbPress importer versus direct SQL script.
– Community support and notification.
– Staging and testing on live sites.
– 10x rule for new problems: memory leaks, multibyte language character count
truncation, different slug lengths between schemas, saturated postmeta queries.
– Planned downtime.
– WSOD disaster two days before the scheduled changeover at 95% data load.
– SUCCESS!!!