Thread

I was approached by a client that wanted a redesign of his website. The problem is that he runs a division within a university. The university has a main website, but each school within the university manages its own website.

I can’t imagine university marketing/IT allowing me much access at all to their server. It seems like a problem to have no .htaccess permissions. Also the URL structure (crucial to EE) seems questionable.

I’m assuming I would setup a my own separately hosted server and have the university update their DNS A-record for mysubdomain.university.edu to point to my server. Then I would have full access to everything I need, and the mysubdomain.university.edu/template_group/ should work properly. Is this how you would do it?

Yes there’s no reason why they can’t set up a staging area on a subdomain on their server that you have FTP access to - the actual URL doesn’t really matter so much. They can create a database for you then you just install EE using details they provide.

Alternatively you could do the build offsite on your own server then transfer the site to the live server when ready.