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By Anonymous (not verified) on
Drupal Community,
Okay so I know this is all over the internet on how to setup a secondary site. But it seems to me that these are all "permanent" solutions. A few months ago I got into Drupal and worked on a site for my startup photography business. Over the months I've continued to read up on things like CCK (which I'm still grasping - and slowly getting it), etc. I have needed to revamp my website to be more efficient and user friendly, especially after being inspired by a photography site I found here (firstforweddings.co.uk).
Anywho, I want to setup a secondary site (oh, say in /sites/develop) and build everything from scratch so that my current production site remains unscathed. Then once I'm done with that site, I'd like to copy it over as the production site (obviously).
Case in point:
1. Can I copy the /sites/develop into /sites/default upon completion?
2. If so, how do I setup /sites/develop?
Sorry for asking this question again, but I would REALLY appreciate some help with this. Thanks in advance!
-Anthony
Comments
Local development
Anthony: I realize I am not answering your question directly, but why don't you set up a local site where you can develop and test, and when it's ready, upload the whole thing?
As far as my (limited) experience goes, when working in multisite environments, files get written to /sites/foo or /sites/bar depending on if you're accesing site foo or bar, therefore changing only the files from /develop to /default without telling the database the files have moved, would end up making drupal look for your files in the wrong place.
AFAIK, it would do you far better to develop in a local environment (it's not that hard to set up and it's free) and then upload when you're ready.
Ya know...
As silly as it sounds, the thought didn't even occur to me to setup locally and then deploy. THANK you for pointing out the obvious.
http://www.mccammonphotography.com
Files will get written to
Files will get written to /sites/foo or /sites/bar only if you keep the default settings for the location of the files directory, which is a very poor choice anyway, in my opinion. The location of the files is completely up to you, and it is logical to use a directory which does not depend on the exact domain name.
If you choose a local development site, which is also fine, give some thought to the file and image paths in the content and whether they'll be correct after the move.
To set up a second site for
To set up a second site for development, see this recent discussion:
http://drupal.org/node/355642
Copying /sites/develop.example.com to /sites/default might work, if everything else is in place. Understand that /sites/develop.example.com contains just a settings.php file which specifies which database will be used.
I think he gets the "usual"
I think he gets the "usual" concept of a multisite environment. What he is asking, is what should he do / what problems he faces if and when he decides to eliminate the secondary multi site in favor of replacing the original one with the secondary.
Anthony: when you set up your development server, you might want to visit Administer > Site configuration > File system. This lets you configure the default file locations I was referring to earlier and cog.rusty referred to.