Web Shop Refactoring

My web shop codebase really needs tidying up. It includes lots of things that I wouldn't do the way they are done now that I've had some experience of maintaining the codebase.

I have a ton of integration to do. There are two branches to the codebase:

• One (let's call it 'stable') has seen bugfixes and customer-driven improvements, but has been branched a dozen times and is a huge mess.
• One has had some refactoring and more developer-driven improvements, but currently crashes due to character set issues.

After that is done, the administration interface needs to have some serious work done. Most importantly, the ImageChooser service needs to be pretty much redone. It all needs a bit of AJAX on top to make administration a more smooth experience, and I need to hook up TinyMCE to bolt in a minimal CMS.

The difficulty, if I do this work, is that I may still have to work with the aforementioned 'stable' version even though I will have a much improved next-generation version available. Perhaps I can cut a deal on that.

I'm also considering supporting osCommerce, because it would be cheaper in terms of codebase maintenance, but I wouldn't be able to make the same guarantees I can about implementation of bespoke features and use of future-proof technologies. This would be available as an alternative to my shop software.

What I most want to do is rewrite everything in Python. Python is much faster to develop with than PHP, and leads to much tidier and more legible code.