Porting Sites to CARMA

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If you wish to port an existing membership site to CARMA, you should first set up a test site. This test site will allow you to continue using your preexisting site until your CARMA-powered site is ready.

Choose a domain name for your test site-- for example, testsite.example.com. Then, have your host set up testsite.example.com as your actual site, add the site in CARMA, and configure your new site.

When you are configuring your new site in CARMA, try to use relative URLs as opposed to absolute URLs. If you use absolute URLs, you will have to update your URLs when you go live. The following is an example of an absolute URL and a relative URL:

• Absolute URL: http://testsite.example.com/test.html
• Relative URL: /test.html

Note: because relative URLs are shorter, they take up less space. You save disk space and bandwidth, and your members can download pages faster.

Going Live

After you have configured your site, and it is looking and working the way you want, you will have to configure your Apache settings. Make the Apache configuration for your actual site point to the same server directory as your testsite.example.com.

For example, the following Apache site configuration:

ServerName testsite.example.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/members.yoursite.com

Should be changed to:

ServerName actualsite.example.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/members2.yoursite.com

Although your configuration may slightly vary from the example, the general concept remains the same. Once the necessary changes have been made, restart Apache in order to apply your changes.

Finally, replace the testsite.example.com hostname in with the actual site's hostname, which can be found in the CARMA's Sites Admin. For example, replace http://testsite.example.com with http://actualsite.example.com.

If the hostnames you have provided are incorrect, CARMA will not be able to load the correct site. Once you have finished configuring all of the above steps, the only thing left to do is update any remaining absolute URLs that you have configured.

If you have any problems porting your membership site to CARMA, please submit a support ticket.