I am seeking a developer with experience taking a site from concrete 8.5.15 / PHP 7.4 to the current stable versions of concrete 9.x / PHP 8.x. The site, hikingwalking.com, contains over 2,000 pages of hiking trail descriptions, photo galleries and maps with data provided by proprietary relational database tables and XML files.
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The site is using a third party theme, Salix, that has not been upgraded to V9. The goal is keep the current theme by staying on bootstrap 3 and using bootstrap-modified.css from the elemental 9.0 theme to handle dashboard readability issues. Page_theme.php will also need to be updated for asset changes. There are probably other changes that need to be made to stay with my current theme. (I.e. I do not want to change themes or move to Bedrock.)
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The site uses jscript in 4 areas – a galleria script for photo galleries, a leaflet script for maps, a script for reading XML files and a smartmenu script for displaying the cascading menus in the user interface.
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The site uses 18 application blocks, that fall into 3 basic types. The first type extracts data from proprietary relational tables for the display of hiking trail descriptions. The other blocks deal with the display of photo galleries using a third party galleria jscript and maps using leaflet (jscript). The blocks will need upgrades for asset changes.
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The site only uses 2 extensions – Salix for the theme and Cache Warmer, which has not been upgrade to V9 and therefore will not be used with the upgraded site.
My guess is the best options is to first upgrade site to the most stable version of 9 while staying on PHP 7. This will allow for the upgrade of assets and theme modifications. The next step is to upgrade to PHP 8. This is the area where I think we will see the most problems.
There may be some follow-up work to make the site more efficient and cleanup some of the coding.
I have a separate development server that I use for testing upgrades and modifications.
Thank you,
Diane Greer (dianegorp@yahoo.com)