Switch from development subdomain to main domain with minimal downtime

[sean3047]

Hi,

I am working on website refresh for a small business, with the new site being hosted on Wordpress (the current site is on Joomla).

At the moment I am using one of my own servers for development, however I would like to have a dev site running off a subdomain of the actual site. When it comes time for go-live, I would like to simple 'switch' from the main site being hosted by Joomla, to the new Wordpress site.

What would be the easiest (and safest) way to accomplish this? I would also like to have the ability to easily 'roll-back', just in case something goes wrong (not that it should, but given my previous life working for a bank where rollbacks of Internet Banking occurred every third or fourth deployment, I insist on having a rollback plan for everything).

Thanks,
Sean

 

[AndyII]

what I would have done is to set it up on the actual site in a folder, make any changes you need, this way all mysql is ready to go, plugins installed and theme done.
then "One" way is to make another public_html folder in root (call it public_html_new), now "copy" all files from the public_hml folder to the new folder, then do a quick switch of the folder names, change the public_html to public_html_old and now rename the public_html_new to just public_html , if it goes badly, just do the reverse on the name change.
I sometimes have several public folders and can easy switch between different scripts, providing each was properly installed.
NOTE!!!!
One thing about WordPress.... very important to change the URL in WP admin setting to reflect the new url ""before"" doing any folder changes, if you forget you cant get into the dev site unless you use phpmyadmin to change that URL,
and Proceed at your own risk, this is just as an example and the way I have done it before