Thread

About two years ago I had an expression engine site built.Now I want to rebuild it and clean up a lot of the redundant channels and fields. This is a big job for me as I have never built a site in expression engine and I’m getting my feet wet at the deep end. I want to reuse the content that is currently on the site but add pagination, a better search method for my directory and add some other things.

Can I rebuild a new site but reuse the content that’s in the current site? How would I go about doing this?

The site is: http://www.biba.bb

Hello Creative Cycle,

Welcome to the world of ExpressionEngine!

I will do my best to help you with your project.

Here is my suggestion. Duplicate your site and do so locally. To do that, FTP all the files down from your production server to a local one. This could be a computer you setup just to host a duplication of your site or even on your local machine. I run one on my Mac using MAMP, if you are on windows you can use VMWare Player and download an already built Virtual Machine (VM) from somewhere like TurnKey which provides a nice LAMP stack ready to go right out of the box.

On your production server, export your database. Then FTP that down to your local install and import it into a new database. This document will have some helpful tips for folder permissions and such. It’s on moving to a new server with ExpressionEngine, which in your case you are doing only instead of moving, you are duplicating.

Once this is up and working, you can take a snapshot of it and have a point you can always roll back to if anything happens. Now you are free to update, upgrade and try new things without effecting your production website.

If at any point you run into a snag you cannot work through, just post here and I will help.

Cheers,

You’re speaking Dutch to me. I have a testing domain where I plan on building the site then moving the files over to the live domain, can’t this work?

Hello Creative Cycle,

Yes, once you are ready please move tour site to the new server following these directions.

Does that help?

Cheers,

Thanks

Hello Creative Cycle,

No problem!

If you need anything else, please just let us know by opening a new thread.

Cheers,