Today's Joomla Tip: Porting sites with JoomlaPack

Moving a new Joomla site from development to a production server can be a tedious and frustrating task at best. I've done this quite a few times before I descovered JoomlaPack.

This is a Joomla based component designed to backup and restore your website, but it can also be used to port your website to a different server... in minutes!

Backing up your site:
After you've downloaded the component from http://joomlapack.net/ and installed it on your website, click on Components -> JoomlaPack-> Configuration. Under Basic in Common Settings, set the Output Directory to the root of your website, or better yet, one folder level above the root of your site.

Under Advanced in Profile Settings, you can leave all the default settings. However, depending on your destination server, you may have trouble restoring your backup. To ensure maximum compatibility, change the Archiver Engine to "Zip, using PHP functions" and change the "File List" engine to "Pure PHP File System Scanner". If your backup process seems to hang, you can also change "Backup Method" to "Javascript Redirects".

Click the "Backup Now" link. Once the backup is complete, go to "Administrator Backup Files". Select your most recent backup and click "Download" to pull the backup file to your local machine.

Restoring, Porting your site:
DO NOT INSTALL Joomla on your destination web space. Simply upload the backup file to this space along with the file Kickstart.php (included in the JoomlaPack installation file archive). Be sure to create a MySQL database to support the new Joomla site and assign an appropriate database user to it.

Next, open your browser and go to the Kickstart file on your new site, i.e., http://myNewDomain.com/kickstart.php

Follow the onscreen directions , and voila! Don't forget to remove the installation folder after you're done.

If you need a Joomla website, Joomla Bliss Ottawa is the website design shop in Ottawa I co-own with my wife.

If you need SEO, my wife runs an SEO Ottawa consultancy. We'll be happy to help you.