Rebuilding Live Sites

Once Oxygen is activated, it disables the active theme on the site, which means that anything created or rendered by the theme will also be disabled. As such, it's not recommended to install Oxygen on live sites.

There are two methods that can be used to rebuild existing sites; the method you need to choose will depend on if the site is static or active.

Static Sites

If the site is static and doesn't have users logging in or purchasing products then you can create a fresh WordPress install, install Oxygen and rebuild the site from scratch. Once you're happy with it, you can follow these steps to make it live:

1. Take a full backup of the live site in case you need to revert your changes
2. Export the new site using All In One Migration and import it to the new site: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/

Once the site has imported, you will need to:

1. Save your permalinks twice via Settings > Permalinks
2. Resign your shortcodes via Oxygen > Settings > Security
3. Regenerate your CSS cache via Oxygen > Settings > CSS Cache

Live Sites

If the site is active and not static, you can do something like this:

1. Clone the site to a development/staging environment
2. Install Oxygen on the site clone
3. Create templates to display your content and rebuild your pages using Oxygen

Once you're happy with the design and that everything is functioning correctly, you need to merge the changes with your live site:

1. Put the live site into Maintenance mode
2. Take a full backup of the live site in case you need to revert your changes
3. Install Oxygen
4. Export Oxygen's settings from the development site and import them to the live site via Oxygen > Export & Import
5. Create all of your templates on the live site. Copy the JSON for the templates from the development site to the live site by clicking +JSON below the Edit with Oxygen button
6. If you've added any pages or modified existing pages using Oxygen, you will also need to copy the JSON for those pages from the development site to the live site

Once everything is in place, you will need to:

1. Save your permalinks twice via Settings > Permalinks
2. Resign your shortcodes via Oxygen > Settings > Shortcodes
3. Regenerate your CSS cache via Oxygen > Settings > CSS Cache

If you have any caching plugins installed, you will also need to clear the caches.