Thread

Hello.  I have been researching content management systems for a while now and I have landed on EE as the one I want to work with.  My focus is on standards based design and from all I’ve seen EE offers the most freedom with design and separating out the content.  Good job, I say!

But I digress.  My question is this - how easy is it to migrate from a local development server to a production server.  Many of my clients to this point have been smaller businesses without any CMS functionality.  For those sites I develop the xhtml, css, php and simply upload it to the server.  Is it as easy to do with a CMS?  And how does one migrate the database if content is setup there? 

I’m debating whether to install on a new hosting account, doing the work there and simply changing the DNS vs. doing all the work on the local development server here and replacing an existing site.

Any thoughts, best practices would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Tunnel7,

The easiest thing to do is just work on the live site but hide what you are working. You can set access permissions on a per template basis through the Control Panel. When the page is ready to go live, you just update the access permissions and the new template is live. For initial development you can turn the entire site “off” so that only super-admins can see it. This allows you to develop without revealing anything you don’t want to.

Thanks for the quick reply.  This is good to know and will get me going in the right direction!

A related question from another newbie…For a client that has an existing (static HTML) site already in the root directory on their server, what’s the easiest way to develop the EE site right on the live server (without affecting the current web content) and then make the EE site live when the time comes so that it will become the default site returned when someone visits the root URL?  For example, if I developed the EE site in a subdirectory to keep from messing up the stuff in my client’s root directory, then what’s the easiest way to reroute all the paths so that I can later serve the EE site right from the root directory when it’s time to go live?  I’d rather build out the EE site on the client’s actual server the first time, but I want to avoid any potential pitfalls.

Thanks

I am looking at EE for the first time and will be dealing with the same issue. I was thinking about simply changing the .htaccess file to direct hits to the static index.html file instead of the index.php file, keeping the CMS content hidden as long as it doesn’t affect any of the other subdirectories. Any ideas if this would work?

@ejverslu - that should work just fine. You can turn EE “off” so that only super-admins can see it. All other requests would just see the System Offline template. You could throw a little Javascript into that template and/or use .htaccess to redirect from that template as well.

@rickosound -  What ejverslu describes would likely work in your situation as well. Its very unlikely that you would have to install EE in a sub-directory and move it later.