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moving your forum from one folder to another

Hi all,

Just a question : currently I'm running a testforum on Elkarte. Everything is starting to look really good and I would like to migrate my real forum to this forum. I've ran a testmigration before and I know that there will be no issues BUT I do have one question :

Can I move the Elkarte installation to the folder where the original forum used to be? The testforum is in the /Testforum/... folder and the original forum is in the /forum/... folder.
How do I proceed?

I was thinking to first close my forum "for maintenance", then do the migration of the databases to the /Testforum/ installation, then download the /forum/ installation to my local harddrive (as failsafe) and then to copy the /Testforum/ folder into the /forum/ folder.
Next I would change the database paths in the settings.php file and then the forum should be up and running, no?

Thanks for your help,

Walter

Re: moving your forum from one folder to another

Reply #1

Answering from my own experience , not really an expert in ElkArta yet

First as you must know , make a backup of the forum folder and database into a safe place or local machine
next put your live forum into maintenance
next start the importing process , make all the tests to make sure that everything is fine

Then , i would rename the forum folder into something like  forum-x
then rename testforum folder into forum
then use repair settings tool , making sure to keep the maintenance mode option in the tool is ON to earn some time for checking

when everything seems ok , turn off the maintenance mode
if anything gone wrong , to bring old forum to live again , just rename the old forum folder back , turn off maintenance , and do more testing

and if you are importing from a different forum script that has different URLs for your pages then i suppose you will need to get ready for redirecting old to new URLs before making it your live forum site avoiding too much 404 errors


Re: moving your forum from one folder to another

Reply #2

The way I did it I stuck Elkarte in a subdirectory, imported my old SMF forum and then once I'd ascertained everything was in order I migrated Elk to the original location by changing a few locations in settings.php and the database.

Of course all with copious backups and testing. By keeping the two forums in different prefixes (not like you can really do it any other way, lol) you can also toss back the old forum in a jiffy if things don't work out immediately while you figure out what went wrong. Basically the process is risk-free as long as you don't delete anything (merely move) and keep plenty of backups around.

Re: moving your forum from one folder to another

Reply #3

Quote from: Frenzie – The way I did it I stuck Elkarte in a subdirectory, imported my old SMF forum and then once I'd ascertained everything was in order I migrated Elk to the original location by changing a few locations in settings.php and the database.

Of course all with copious backups and testing. By keeping the two forums in different prefixes (not like you can really do it any other way, lol) you can also toss back the old forum in a jiffy if things don't work out immediately while you figure out what went wrong. Basically the process is risk-free as long as you don't delete anything (merely move) and keep plenty of backups around.

I used this same method.  Worked like a charm!

Re: moving your forum from one folder to another

Reply #4

Quote from: Frenzie – The way I did it I stuck Elkarte in a subdirectory, imported my old SMF forum and then once I'd ascertained everything was in order I migrated Elk to the original location by changing a few locations in settings.php and the database.
Oh yeah, I forgot to say but implied lower down, that of course I moved the original SMF files into a new subdirectory named "old" or some such before I moved the /elk subdir into the main dir. ;)

Re: moving your forum from one folder to another

Reply #5

Thank you all for the feedback, I'm going to do the migration today. 

Re: moving your forum from one folder to another

Reply #6

Best luck!