I looked at the existing codebase and taking into account my experiences with previous Django projects/deployments I would suggest to do the following:
- Change directory structure to something more modular and structured
- Lose all old south migrations and create inital ones for 1.8
- Check all models for changes with 1.8, because there will be
- Get a mysql slave up on my vps to test the new setup
- Use nginx as reverse proxy for gunicorn and to serve static content (and node.js if it's used)
- Use supervisord to keep an eye on processes (gunicorn, node.js, etc.)
- Integrate existing config in a more generic way of handling configs (dev/staging/live)
- Start rewriting views (from what I have seen, this should be quite doable with existing packages like django-class-based-auth-views and the work already done)