Thread

Hi,

I’ve tried to find an answer to my question here but couldn’t. Apologies if this has been previously answered.

My client has three sites running under 1.6.9 (build 20100415). Each site is a separate domain. The project is to combine all three sites into one new, restructured site, while leaving the other sites running during the build.

My approach to this is to create a new temporary site in MSM, where I’m building the new unified site.

This produces:

Site A/domain A
Site B/domain B
Site C/domain C
Site temp

What I want to do is have the new site (temp) become Site A/domain A. The domains for sites B and C will become redirects to specific pages on the new site.

Currently, Site A is installed in the root, while B,C and the new temp site in subdirectories.

My question is, when we’re ready to launch, i.e. replace Site A with Site Temp for domain A, I’m unclear on what steps to take. I know I need to make some changes to path.php and the host can help setup the new redirects for domains B and C, but how I can make the new temp site the site for domain A is escaping me.

I hope this makes sense! Thanks.

Hi, hwalker. There really isn’t a good method for doing this, other than to do the following:

Upgrade to EE 2.1.3

Purchase DataGrab, which is a third party offering allowing you to import from an RSS feed into EE. It’s not free, but it would help with moving content from one standalone site to a MSM site.

Is moving to EE2.x something on your radar?

Hi Sue,

The client is interested in upgrading to EE2, but they wanted to do so after the launch of the new centralized site. They use a few plugins (LG htaccess generator, Textile, Subcategories, Child Categories, LG Replace ), which I haven’t had a chance to checd on their compatibility yet. They prefer not to do the upgrade under duress.

I wasn’t aware of DataGrab. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look into it.

I did some experimenting with the path.php files in both the root and the temp site directory, along with some htaccess rewrites. I think I may have found a workaround. I got Domain A to show the new site (temp), and I managed to hide the subdirectory containing the new site (“dev”) from the urls. During my brief test it seemed to work. Since I was working on a live site, I quickly undid the changes and will experiment this weekend during low-traffic hours.

I don’t if know this approach will have some problems that weren’t immediately obvious. Have you heard of anyone doing this through changes to path.php and htaccess files? I hope to have more information after this weekend, and will post back with the results.

I realize this isn’t a great solution, but if it works it gets their site up and running, giving us breathing room make a permanent upgrade later, and potentially deal with incompatible plugins. The category-related plugins are essential for this site to run. Can you suggest a way to check compatibility for plugins?

Thanks!

Hi hwalker,

With regards to add compatibility, the only way to deal with this is to contact the original plugin authors and ask them what the status of EE 2.x compatibility is. Moving domains is essentially a hosting issue though you will have to make some changes to your config and/or path files to reflect the new domain (as I think you’ve done in your tests). If you are successful in your further testing then please consider adding a entry for others to reference in the future.

Cheers

Greg

Hi Greg,

My test seemed to work. I haven’t yet seen where I need to modify config.php, but path.php, system preferences and htaccess needed some minor tweaks to switch the old site with new one.

I’d be happy to put something in the wiki about this, but doubt the demand for it. If someone needs to replace one site with another in MSM, please PM me.

Thanks for you help.

I’d put it in the wiki anyhow, since what if you need to do the same thing 6 months from now, and you haven’t documented how you did it? I consider the wiki a note to self archive if nothing else.

But glad things are working again. Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.

Now really closing thread.