Site migration
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This is a step-by-step guide on how to migrate all your pages, files and data from one Online Business site to a new Online Business site. Use this guide for creating an exact copy of your site including the modules and functionality that you have implemented. For this article the site you are migrating from will be known as the source site while the site you are migrating to will be known as the destination site.
Site Migration is a manual process that will require you to use FTP and the Dreamweaver Triangle Plugin. There are up to 10 major steps to migrating a site depending on the features you have used within your source site.
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Creating the Destination Site
The first step in migrating your site is to prepare your destination site. Create a new site using the Online Business Builder and you will be given you 3 options. Choose the 'Start From Scratch' option. This will give you an empty site for which you can copy all the pages, images, files from your source site. Do not choose the 'Import Your Current Website option' as this will not copy across your templates or files
After this step fill in the site details as you would for a standard new site build with your name, email address and site name. The destination site name will need to be different from the source site name. Pay close attention to the country you choose as this will affect which data center your new site is hosted on. Your site will be hosted on the data center closest to the country you have selected. At the time of writing there are separate Online Business Data Centers in the North Americas, Europe and Asia/Pacific.
Using FTP to Move All Pages and Files
Now that you have a destination site for your migration you'll need copy all the directories and files from your source site. Your destination site should be empty except for a StyleSheets folder containing the default ModuleStylesheets.css file.
For this step we recommend that use a graphical drag and drop FTP client. The screenshots shown here are from the FireFTP plugin for Firefox. If you're using a different browser you can use FileZilla FTP client to do your transfers.
You will not be able to directly transfer files from your source site to your destination site. Instead, using FTP, you will need to copy all files and folders from the source site to a temporary folder on your local machine. Then copy these files and folders exactly as they are to your destination site from your local machine.
Copy All Files and Folders To Local Drive
Create a temporary folder on your local machine to hold all the files and directories from your source site. Open your FTP client, login to your source site then select all the files and copy them across to the local temporary folder you have created.
Copy Files and Folders from Local Drive to Destination Site
Now login to your destination site using your FTP client and copy all the files and folders from the local temporary folder to the root directory of your destination site.
Migrating Site Templates and Layouts
Now that you have moved all the images, pages and files (including CSS and Javascript) from your source site to your destination site you will need to migrate any Site-wide templates and layouts you have customized in your source site.
Note that if you have Dreamweaver and our Dreamweaver Extension Triangle, you can shortcut this process. Please see the next section for more information.
Copying Site-wide Templates
In your source site you will need to go to Admin --> Manage Site-Wide Templates. For each template that you havecustomized you will need to download it by selecting it and clicking 'Show More Options'. This will give you a download link for the HTML for that template.
In your destination site you will need to go to Admin --> Manage Site-Wide Templates. Create a Template with exactly the same name as you had in your source site. Save this template. Now click on 'Show More Options' and upload the file that you downloaded from your Source Site. At this stage you can Save and Publish your template
Take note that you have set the same template in the destination site to be the default template as was in the source site by ticking the Make Default Template box when you upload the HTML. You will need to repeat this process for all templates you have customized in your source site to move them to the destination site.
The last step in migrating your site-wide templates from your source site to your destination site is to make sure the pages in your destination site are referring to the correct templates. You'll need to go through all the Webpages underneath the website tab and manually select which template they should be using as per the source site. This information is not migrated across in the FTP html file download and upload.
Copying Site Layouts
Apart from migrating Site Templates, if you have customized your system layouts such as the system emails, system messages, eCommerce shop layouts, modules layouts etc in your source site you will need to manually move these across too to your destination site. Go to Admin-->More Customization Options and you will be given a list of all the available layouts inside your system.
For each of the layout options you'll need to click through to the individual layout so you can see the editor. Open your source and destination sites and go to exactly the same layout option in both then copy and paste the HTML code (from the editor in HTML mode) from the source site to the destination site. The example shown here is with the Online Shop Large Individual Product view.
Using Triangle to Migrate Templates and Layouts (optional)
You can use Dreamweaver and Triangle to streamline the migration process. If you use this process you do not have to follow the manual copy and paste process between two sites opened in different browsers as outlined above.
Click here to read the whole article on migrating templates and layouts using Triangle and Dreamweaver.
Migrating Site Navigation
With your pages, site templates and customized layouts all copied to your destination site it should start resembling your source site now. The next step is to replicate the source site navigation bars in the destination site. When new sites are created they come with a single standard main menu, you'll need to delete all the default items in this menu and manually re-create the menu to match the source site. The first step is to choose the menu type for your destination to match your source site.
After deleting all the default items, manually re-create the menu-items to match the source site from top to bottom making sure you get the names,pages they link to and parent item correct. If the source menu-items have the 'Assign Your Own CSS' tickbox checked you should be replicating this and using the same CSS class names (remember you already FTP'd your CSS classes across). Some menu items will link to modules like catalogs, blogs and web-apps, leave these links empty for the moment but create the menu item as you will need to migrate those sections of the site over first.
Detailed Migration How-Tos
Congratulations! You've made it this far in your migration journey - you should now have the 'frame' of your destination site looking like your source site with pages, templates, navigation and images all matching. Now it's time to replicate all the juicy functionality like your Online shop, any Web Apps you've built, Modules and Webforms you've customized etc.
The next part of this how-to document is split up into 6 mini-migration guides that you'll need to follow depending on the functionality of your source site. You may even want to use these to help you migrate part of a site for example an existing e-Commerce shop from an old site to a new site that's been re-designed.
Contacts Database Migration
To move your contacts from your source site to your destination site you will need to:
- Generate a customer report with all your contacts in your source site
- Export the report to Excel
- Edit the excel file with the contacts so it matches the import format
- Import the contacts into your destination site
Click here to see the full article on how to migrate your customer database
E-Commerce Migration
To move your online shop from your source site to your destination site there are 6 major steps to follow:
- Export your products from your Source Site to your local machine
- Import the same products from your local machine to your Destination Site
- Re-create your Catalog structure in your destination site
- Replicate the Shipping Options and Tax Codes
- Replicate the Payment Gateway Settings
- Copy and Paste your Online Shop HTML layouts from your Source Site to your Destination site.
Click here see the full article on how to migrate your online store
Webforms Migration
To move your webforms from your source site to your destination site these are the major points to take note of:
- If you have used webforms as modules, you'll just need to re-create the forms and re-insert the webform modules into the corresponding parts of your destination site
- If you have customized your webforms then you will need to re-create the forms and integrate the customized HTML of the source site with the new form HTML on the destination site
- Customized Webforms need to be re-inserted as HTML onto the corresponding parts of your destination site
Click here for the full article on how to migrate Webforms
Modules Migration
This article will show you the principles for moving simple modules like FAQ, Announcements, Site Search, Photo Gallery, Literature from your source site to your destination site. There are 3 main points to note:
- You will need to manually re-create the modules on the destination site to match the source site.
- Manually copy across module content from the source site to the destination site
- Copy and Paste the customized HTML module layouts from the source site to the destination site.
Click here to view the full article on migrating your Modules
Web Apps Migration
Migrating Web-Apps is a complex operation. These are the major steps you will need to follow:
- Create a Web-App in your destination site with the same database schema and settings as the source web-app
- Export your Web-App items from your Source site to your local machine
- Import the same Web-App from your local machine to your destination Site
- Copy and Paste all the customized Web-App layouts.
- Migrate the Web-App forms such as the web-app item submission form and web-app search form.
Click here to go to see the full article on how to migrate your Web App
Email Marketing Migration
To migrate email campaigns you will need to:
- Re-create matching email campaigns in your destination site
- Copy and Paste HTML emails over to your destination site
- Re-create the recipient lists for your email campaigns
- Export and Import your contacts into the destination recipient lists.
