Hi @RArchimbaud,
if you want to do nearly everything “from scratch” I would recommend you to go this route:
- decide which templates (and modules) you need and in which order they need to be done so that the “creator” team can begin to migrate the old content to the new pages
- build a roadmap for this step with milestones. If you’re familiar with atomic design you can apply the knowledge to this part. Otherwise - here’s the “documentation”
- start developing according to your roadmap
The CMS CLI part is great to develope modules and templates and move them between environments(sandbox/live).
For your questions:
Do I need to match all the settings off the live website to start coding?
Not really required. E.g. If you work with hubl codes like {{site_settings.company_name }} instead of writing the Company Name into the needed place it will show nothing on the frontend or maybe something like “lorem ipsum” in the sandbox but after you transfer the theme/template/module to the live environment it will show the informations from the settings.
I wouldn’t create new pages in a sandbox because you can’t really export them. Blog posts are different, those can be exported and imported to another environment(live portal).
Is it better to create new pages, templates, modules, navigation… on the live website then when everything is ok delete old pages and content?
Let me ask you a question: Why do you want create new pages/posts in the sandbox? If the answer is: so we don’t loose time - create them in the live page and apply the new template to them once it’s finished. Saves a lot of time. If the answer is: The marketing team want to see everything exactly how it’s gonna be - tell them that it would cost an extrem amount of time (and money) to copy/paste everything(except blog posts) between the environments.
I would suggest to create everything new(templates, modules, functions …) in the sandbox, build some dummy pages with “Lorem ipsum” in the sandbox or recreate one real page per template in the sandbox and present it to them. After you finished developing and everything is approved move it to live, stage all pages and apply new templates/content and whatever is needed.
For the multi-language part:
Of course you can phase all of your translations to the staging environment - they won’t be displayed as “linked” pages as you might know from the website/LP dashboard. But they will be visible as single pages. So you can apply changes to all of them.
I wouldn’t suggest to delete & recreate everything since it’s gonna be more work and you’ll most likely loose your link-juice, ranking …
hope this helps
best,
Anton