Advise on Best Practice for upgrade to Gantry / Zephyr
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- James Kitcher
- Newbie
- Posts: 14
- Thanks: 0
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Hi - Currently I am running a website
http://www.crossfitdavis.com
that's using Hyperion. I would like to upgrade to Gantry / Zephyr but have some questions about how to go about it, especially creating a development site on the same server or on a Xampp for Linux box at home.
Ok - The current joomla installation lives right off of public.html. I'd created a separate installation of joomla using the rockettheme launcher package in a folder called dev and created a subdomain in cpanel, ( http://dev.crossfitdavis.com ). I was screwing around with the rocketlauncher demo content and decided I wanted to get my content in there instead so I did a full site back up of the production site and restored it to the dev directory. The only thing I filtered was the images/stories folder since it's got a lot of images and would slow the backup / archive download down. I thought the images in the articles would be broken and that I could just copy the image files directly into the new /images/stories directory on the dev site. Is that the case?
Anyhoo - the restoration into the new directory created a new site, but the database is the same - so I have two hyperion based sites and one db powering them which means I really don't have a dev site at all since the content will change in both.
So - any suggestions for running a second site on the same server or am I being a total n00b about this? Is the hard love answer just to suck it up, backup and download the whole shebang and restore it to a local Linux XAMPP box, get things the way I like and then upload and restore the Zephyr based site to production on bluehost? (last time with a crappy dsl connection it took over 24hours to upload. Ugh). Even so - what about new content that gets put up while I'm mucking around with the local version?
Apologies if this is rudimentary. I'm self taught and learning. I'd like to do things the right way vs. throwing up a "the server is down" page, turning on Zephyr and hacking away. Is that an approach though? Like maybe mapping out all the modules and creating them before turning on Zephyr?
Thanks in advance for your help.
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- Ben Lee
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 4193
- Thanks: 42
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You can put two installs on the same server space, but you need to have them linked to different databases.
I do recommend using the Akeeba Backup component for moving sites.
If you have a test site or dev site in a subdirectory, you can link it to a separate database so it doesn't interfere with the first site. Then when you want to move it over, you can move the main site files to a directory called "/OLD_SITE"...just in case you need to put it back...and then move your dev site files to the main site directory. After moving the files, you'll need to adjust the "configuration.php" file to point to the correct directories, I think there are two lines that need to be changed.
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- JEM
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 17917
- Thanks: 4
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To answer a few of your questions…
If you want to use a new template on your site using your current content, probably the best course of action is to back up the site, install it in a sub folder (or local host), then apply the template and extensions, and then your content around to match the new template positions.
I don’t know about filtering and restoring images, as Akeeba should backup the entire structure and allow you to restore images later, I’ve never tested it.
When you back up a site and install it in a subdirectory or sub folder, you need to create a new DB for it so it is completely separate from the original site.
Using Akeeba, when you get to the DB screen the old values will appear by default, but you can change them to match the new DB that you have created.
My advice, try again.
A) Create a subfolder in the root (you don’t need a subdomain)
Create a new DB
C) Back up your site, the default file extension is .jpa, I always switch to .zip.
D) In you CP, navigate to the zip file, then extract it to the subfolder you created in step A
E) Navigate to the subfolder in your browser and run the install, pointing the new site to the DB you created in step B
F) When the install is complete, apply the new template and all its extensions to the dev site
G) Move your content around, get the site working to the point you are ready to go live
H) Reverses the process, backing up the dev site, and then move it back to the root (more instructions when you get to that point)
As far as working on localhost, the procedure would be the same, and for moving files, it’s always much faster to transfer zip files and extract them at their destination. - Thanks,
jim
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- James Kitcher
- Newbie
- Posts: 14
- Thanks: 0
- JEM and Ben -- thank you so much for your time and uber fast responses! I'm going to get crackalackin' with this great info and get back to you when it's time to go live. Hopefully, there aren't issues prior to that. :cheesy:
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