Short version: I've got a website designed from osCommerce and worked on by at least three different people over the years which is so poorly formatted I can't find my way around. Should I spend the time deleting unused files (safely of course, after backing everything up) and cleaning up the code files, or should I do a fresh install of osCommerce and make the changes properly from the ground up?
Long Version: I'm working for the first time as a PHP programmer, though I took a number of classes back in school. I've been employed by an e-commerce buisness to work on their website. They use osCommerce and have had three web developers over the years, each of whom has modified the code. Two of them didn't believe in comments or easy-to-understand formatting.
The boss wants me to duplicate the site for a new webspace, simply replacing all of the references to the current company with references to a new company; ie: change all the references to bobswarehouse.com to mandyswarehouse.com.
When I went to pull the site onto a local server for debugging and to replace the image files I found that the website folder contained over 4 gigs of files (.5 of which were product images, but at lot of the rest of which were trash files: old versions of the website, MP3s, etc)
Moreover, when I copied out all the files (including the unnessecary stuff) the site stopped working. While attempting to debug the site I've realized that the code itself is in horrible condition. It's poorly documented, poorly formatted, and adheres to no standards.
Also it's formatted using tables, and I thought modern sites were supposed to use CSS and div tags and whatnot for that.
So my current question is: given all the problems with the current site (which works, it's just impossible for me to puzzle out) should I spend time cleaning up the code and files in order to get things organized, or should I do a fresh install (which will mean finding all the community content they incorporated over the years, as well as creating custom content and debugging)?
