Last week I launched my summer side project, Stackable, and then a day later I completely rebranded to WP Freighter. You can read here on why I ended up changes names. Changing brand names is painful. However if you need to change names it’s best just to do it sooner rather than later.
There is no graceful process for doing this. It’s a breaking change and it’s going to require all previous paid customers to uninstall the old plugin and install the new one. If you find yourself in the same situation as myself, then the following list might be helpful for you.
All of the places that required updating.
My side project is rather small in scope. It’s a simple WordPress plugin that does just a few things. That said I was surprised at how many layers I needed to dig around in order to get everything renamed and working.
- Github – Add the new logo, rename the organization, and rename the project.
- Local computer –
git clonethe new project name. This is easier done than messing around the with.git/configdeploy hooks and puts the files into a properly named new folder. - WordPress plugin – Update all code and documentation references. See this commit. Bug fix anything that was missed.
- Deployment scripts – All of my plugins have deployment scripts so I can easily run a single command to bundle up and deploy the new zip. That needed to be updated to use the new plugin.
- Twitter – rename profile and upload new logo.
- Stripe – rename organization, upload new logo and update EDD webhooks url.
- Website – upload new logo, rename all outdated references, upload new packaged up plugin, redo intro video, update custom code referencing the old plugin.
- Domain – Configure old domain to redirect over to new domain.
- Email – Attach new domain to email provider and switch over to use them instead. For this side project I’m using Fastmail as my provider which luckily this was very easy to do.