Best way to install/deploy templated websites

[jpage101]

Hello all,

First I would like to say that while I am still very new to PHP and CMSMS, the learning process has been wonderful and I have received great help on this board already. Here is my scenario:

We had 5 static websites designed for us. I have/will be taking these designs and integrating CMSMS into all of them. Our customers will be selecting a design choice and then we will be setting up the website for them so they can edit their live site. Ex:

• - Site Design 1
• - Site Design 2
• - Site Design 3
• - etc.

With our old static websites, when someone chose a design we basically just copy the entire root folder from one "sample site" to the new site entry on our webserver. At this point, all we would need to do is edit the static html files and we were done.

I saw an article in the documentation about moving a cmsms site from one server to another, and closely followed this to see if this is how we should deploy our new sites since all customers will have the same content pages / permissions / modules / etc. I downloaded all of my files from the test site I was building and uploaded them to the new site (it was close to about 17MB which took a bit of time on my connection since we are using cloud hosting provider - Rackspace). I created a mysql db for the new site, imported an archive of the original db, and edited my config.php file to update the new db credentials. The site itself displayed fine (from what I can tell) but there are a few quirks in the admin panel that I have noticed so far:

• - CSS doesn't seem to be applied to the admin login page anymore.
• - When I update a template/stylesheet/udt from within the admin panel, the progress notice at the top of the page that tells you if there was an error or it it was successfully updated does not display correctly - all i see is a pink background. There is no text at all.

I am sure there are other issues that I have yet to discover. I am wondering if there is a better way to deploy all of these sites? I would like to streamline the deployment process as much as I can. Currently, the way I am attempting, would make each site independent of each other as they would all be separate entries with their own database. Is this the best way to do this? I am also thinking if I ever need to update CMSMS, I would need to do it individually for each one which could be a problem as we will easily have 100+ sites within 6 months.

Thank you very much in advance for your input on this matter.

[Dr.CSS]

When you move a site it is sometimes best to add the install folder from the same version and run /install but at STEP 5: DON'T CREATE TABLES OR INSTALL DEFAULT CONTENT this will make sure all paths in config.php are correct...