Rewrite. I led the development team for a rewrite of a successful web product for a small-mid size web company that was built on PHP4 in 2002-2003.
Like you said, the way it was built, a change to one thing would effect everything else which didn't exactly encourage improvements and innovation in the product. We were able to maintain the existing product (5 hours a week) while rewriting it from the bottom up to include the modularity and extensibility that would drive the future of the company and the product.
The rewrite was successful after 8 months of coding and testing, and in the following year the traffic increased by 200M pv/m
Like you said, the way it was built, a change to one thing would effect everything else which didn't exactly encourage improvements and innovation in the product. We were able to maintain the existing product (5 hours a week) while rewriting it from the bottom up to include the modularity and extensibility that would drive the future of the company and the product.
The rewrite was successful after 8 months of coding and testing, and in the following year the traffic increased by 200M pv/m