Wanting to do a fresh install - with SOME of my old database

I originally set up a shopping cart almost 3 years ago and in that time have managed to sorta kinda make it work while managing to break afew things in the process. I now want a completely fresh install but want to hang on to all my customer info but NOT my product info and am not sure what the process is going to be.

Right now the cart is installed at http://shop.mydomain.com. It contains all my customer's info as well as several hundred products, some active and many NOT active. There are hundreds of photos in the photo folders that are no longer linked to a product since each item I sell is a one of a kind.

I'd like to set up a full working version at http://test.mydomain.com, tweaked and customized to my liking. This will then be my working copy to make any changes to before carrying them over to the 'live' cart in the future, incase I break anything.

THEN, I need to somehow get that new version over to http://shop.mydomain.com and populate it with a fresh batch of products, deleting out the mass chaos that is in there right now. The product catagory structure on the new version will be completely different. However I need to KEEP all my current customer info so they can continue logging in and looking up past orders and the such and I can look up their history as I often send out emails offering deals based on past purchases.

All of this of course needs to be done with minimal down time. I'm not sure what my plan of attack here should be. Step 1 would be to set up the cart at http://test.mydomain.com and do all customizations. What next? Do I populate the test cart with my products before copying it over to the live one? How do I merge the databases of products on the test cart with customers on the currentl live one? If I put the products into the test cart, what happens down the road when I do another upgrade or edit and want to copy the changes over again? My inventory is constantly changing as each item is handmade in batches of only 2 - 4.

I'd greatly appreciate some direction on this as my site's third anniversary is rapidly approaching and I would love to launch a new site as part of the 'birthday celebration'.

What you are proposing is not overly difficult, and instead of trying to tinker about in the database, rather use Easy Populate to both REMOVE products and categories, and then to UPLOAD new products and categories.

EP has this capability, but also, when you view your current product set in a spreadsheet, it is often easer to see where you are and make decisions regarding the info in front of you.

Read my WIKI on Easy Populate:

http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Easy_Populate

I intended to look into Easy populate as well, since the plan is to add new products every 2 weeks, while removing items that have been sold out in that time. Right now sold out items go inactive, and I edit them for new images (the descriptions often stay the same when I add new inventory, but this method is extremely cumbersome.

The current site was a 'oh crap, I need a solution FAST so I'll put up this barebones site and deal with the details later'. It's now almost 3 years later and the site is no longer working as well as I want it to, so it's time for a complete overhaul.

I do however want to start with a fresh install of the cart because in my current one I tried adding a few modules, some of which work well and others never did and have affected the functionality of the site.