Porting Sites to CARMA
For clients that purchased Carma that already have live sites it is usually beneficial to create a development site for setting and configuring your new Carma Site before you go live. This will allow your existing site to stay in operation while you get it's replacement ready.
Setting Up Test Site
Where you put the testing version of the site is up to you, if your member's site was members.yoursite.com, then any of the following would be good choices:
members2.yoursite.com testing.members.yoursite.com members.yoursite.com/testing dev.members.yoursite.com members.yoursite.com/dev
These are just examples, feel free to use your own naming scheme. For our example, let use members2.yoursite.com.
You would have your host set members2.yoursite.com up as a new website, set up the Carma site script symlinks, and set up and configure the new site as you see fit. Once the site is looking and working the way you would want, then you would just have to do a few simple thigns to go live with the Carma Site.
Going Live
Our task now is to make members.yoursite.com look just like your testing site members2.yoursite.com. Do to the way Carma works this is fairly simple.
- Make sure that members.yoursite.com points to the same server as members2.yoursite.com
- Change your Apache configuration of members.yoursite.com to point to the same server directory as members2.yoursite.com
E.g. If you Apache site configuration looked like this:
ServerName members2.yoursite.com DocumentRoot /path/to/members.yoursite.com
You would just need to change it to look like this:
ServerName members.yoursite.com DocumentRoot /path/to/members2.yoursite.com
Your configuration might be slightly different but the general concept should be the same. Once the changes are made, restart Apache to have the changes take affect.
- Lastly you need to adjust the site urls and hostname inside Carma's Site Admin. If the hostnames are wrong then the correct site will not be brought up. Following our example you will want the new hostname to be:
members.yoursite.com
and the new url would be:
http://dreamgirlsmembers.com
Once that is done the only thing you have to worry about are links you hard codded, but assuming you didn't do that then you should be good to go live.
