Thread

I’ve developed the prototype templates and design for a site on one EE account and now want to move them to their new home. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find out exactly how to do this. Everything I come across in the discussions and knowledge base is either about migrating a complete site, including database, or a dead link about pMachine. I’d like to keep designing on my site for other communities, but I’m finding EE a bit of a bugger to design on one site and move the design to another.

There are 5 weblogs in the site, each with it’s own set of templates. What’s the best way to go about moving this templates short of copying and pasting all the code?

And finally, I still don’t get the themes vs. templates issue. I don’t see the difference between a theme and a template nor do I understand how I change a template’s theme other than swapping out code and the css.

Thanks for any pointers.

You can export your templates as a Zip file by template group. See attached screen shot for location.

The result is a nicely zipped archive of all templates in the group. Simply unzip and copy/paste into the new site (assuming you’ve created matching template groups and templates in the new site).

I’m sure there’s a way to do it via SQL as well but this should get you started.

Okay, thanks. I’d already figured out how I would do it via copy-and-paste by re-creating everything manually in the new site setup. I’d just hoped EE had a more elegant and efficient solution.

As much as I like a lot about EE, I wish the development team would worry less about geek coolness factors and focus more on the basics of efficient, rapid development of the most dominant site features.

I guess I’ll go start recreating the wheel. *sigh*

Hi, drycreekcommunity - welcome to the forums. =)

There is a solution, you can create your own template library templates; alternatively, you could download the default themes and use that method to create your own themes, so that you can create a weblog based off the theme.  The maker of OceanMist and Hemingway ports for EE did that; and I’ve used them to start up new sites with great success.

As far as the “geek coolness factor”, a huge amount of new features in ExpressionEngine, in every new release, come directly from the Feature Request forums.  We are extremely responsive to customer needs and requests; and I do encourage you to post your feature request there, and include how you might see it working and how it might help.

Every single feature that goes into ExpressionEngine is thought out from many angles; and nothing goes into ExpressionEngine without a lot of thought and planning; we’re extremely concerned about the quality, speed, security, efficiency, and usability of ExpressionEngine. 

Thanks again for your feedback.