The problem is as follows: A new WordPress site will be installed on the same Nginx server as the current one. The current one (based on Joomla) has some complex database functionalities which will be reused. I.e. the new site will retrieve a section of it’s content from the old site, with PHPs file_get_contents() or HTTPRequests.
I have no knowledge about the current site, so I’m afraid that when I try to give it a new address, I will break things. This is what this question is based on, so if I’m already wrong here, please say so.
Now my idea is to just install a wordpress site with the wordpress address configurations set to the domainname, but without setting the servers pointers for that domainname to the new site. Now I will add a rewrite rule to the current site, which rewrites all incoming traffic to the new site (directory on the server), except when the request comes from localhost, so the new site itself CAN get to the current site.
I’m relatively new to this kind of things, thinking of my proposed solution raises questions too. My question is whether my solution will work, and / or is there a better way of doing this? Unfortunately I can’t just go test it.
Thanks
In theory that approach will work but it sounds rather fragile. Rewrite rules can be very tricky to get right even if you know what you’re doing, so the “unless it’s coming from localhost” may throw you for a loop.
You say you’re not sure the existing site will break if you move it to a new domain or subdomain, but there’s really no harm in trying, since you can leave the existing domain intact while you try.
So if the existing site is at example.com, try setting up a second virtual host that serves it from internal.example.com. If it works (or at least delivers the content your’e trying to scrape), go ahead & set up the WordPress site and get the content using the “internal” URL.
The real problem though is that now you’re stuck maintaining both a Joomla site and a WordPress site. What is the complex database functionality you’re trying to reuse? Is it at all possible to migrate that into a standalone PHP block that you can then call from WordPress?