Best way to take development site to live site?

[geeves]

Hi guys.

I was just wondering what the best way is to take a site, from a local development environment (xampp on Windows XP in my case) to a live host.

I tried it for the first time this week and everything was broken and I had to reinstall the CMS on the live site and add modules manually.

Here were the steps I had taken.
1. Zip up local site
2. upload zip of local site to host
3. unzip on host via unix shell
4. dump local database to sql query
5. run sql in step 4 on host
6. modify config / htaccess on live site to reflect paths etc

Once I did this, I found that some modules were broken and I had to end up installing CMSMS from scratch.

If anyone can offer any better way of doing this I would appreciate any suggestions to make life a little easier.

TIA

[viebig]

I usually do that! I´m sure it´s the best way

config.php has several lines to be changed, be sure that it´s ok

Broken Modules? how broken?

after zipping and uploading do check the md5 file hash

[frankmanl]

What worked for me (several times) was to install CMSMS on the live site (that way the config file is set up correctly), then replace its database tables by the ones of the development site and upload all extra images and files.

[geeves]

Hey guys.

Thanks for the feedback.

The specific issues I had when performing the method (as described in my first post) was that the Form Builder module wouldn't appear on the site. The templates and stylesheets weren't up to date and there were duplicate entries of the two sample forms in Form Builder module in the admin backend.

There were a few other little issues, but otherwise it wasn't as seamless as other CMSes I have done the same thing to.

Thanks again.