Cms/upload Best Practice? - New to using content management, seeking advice.

Other than my aborted attempt at setting up a site on my previous free web host, this will be the first time that I have set up a dynamic website with an SQL back end. I came from the Internet stone-age of static sites with lots of graphics and text, but little or no interactivity. I would really appreciate some advice on how best to do this.

I have selected the free Content Management System called Lanius CMS, which is made by the makers of the more well-known package called Drake CMS. Also, at the advice of many of the denizens of the Trap17 forums, I have downloaded and installed XAMPP as a localhost for testing purposes. What I would like to know is this: should I upload my HTML and php documents directly from my localhost to my Trap17 hosting account? It seems to me that, with a website controlled by a CMS, the htdocs files are only the structure and skeleton of the website, and the actual content is stored in the database. Am I right? Therefore I can use the htdocs files from my localhost as the source for my FTP upload sessions when I am uploading the Lanius CMS files to my new site, right? Also, I have installed several copies of Truppentool, the SQL-powered troop statistics tool for Travian players, on my localhost. Should I also use these files as the source of my uploads of Truppentool to my Trap17 account? Alternatively, should I keep everything separate, and have two copies of everything on my local hard disk, one copy that I am playing with in my XAMPP localhost, and one copy that I use as source files for the upload to my Trap17 account? Either way, I know that I will need to set up the SQL databases independently. Any advice?

 

 

 

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Sooo many questions!!! Alright, you are on perfect track on your setup with XAMPP! Although if I was in your place I would use PHP Fusion for beginners CMS. Its perfect, stable ( v7), Amazingly fast...

First you should copy the localhost files of your cms to the server htdocs folder and the other files of Truppentool. Which ftp program are you using. Filezilla Ftp uploader would be fine.

You would have better numbered your questions. Anyway I will give steps for your problem. Now for the database. You can use the PHPMy Admin. You can find in XAMPP default index.
1) select the name of database of your cms which you initially gave at the beginning.
2) Then choose export. There at the bottom, choose save to file checkbox.
3) Now save the text file which it produces to any directory.
4) Now in your trap17 cpanel, create the database (any name, I will give reason for it soon).
5) Now import the saved sql file form your computer. You will see that the database name has the format "username_yourdbname".
6) Now go to your server cms folder and find something like config.php. Open it and change your database details. Thats it.

When you're playing with your locahost cms, my opinion would be to have another setup in your computer for that. For the cms on server, the htdocs folder contents won't change a lot (mostly images would be added). So at beginning one backup would be fine and then as per changes. And for database, yo
u can take its backup almost all the time you can think . . Anyway, weekly backup would suffice.

For databse setup check this article by OpaQue

 

 

 

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The files should not be any different, so it shouldn't matter. As you rightly say, most of the data is stored in the database and retrieved dynamically as the pages are loaded. However, with all CMS there will be a configuration file somewhere which contains important settings which cannot be stored in the database (like information for connecting to the database). These files will differ from your local copy and the copy on your hosting account, so will need to be maintained separately. If you are confident manually editing the configuration file in a text editor, just take a copy of it as it is, change it to fit your hosting account, and upload that copy with the rest of the files.

I have a sum total of zero experience with Truppentool, but I assume it is similar - there will be a configuration file which needs to be changed to reflect server-specific settings.

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Well to be quite honest with the purpose of XAMMP is of course to test, however because your using a CMS you can already install that on to your hosting account . So you don't really have to mess around with that as so much individual files that are running php and or MySQL and of course following on what rvalkass said about the configuration file will be important because it connects everything together. Configuration files can be a liitle finicky if all the information is not right and so if you plan to do major edits to the CMS like extensions or modifications, you want to make sure you have a notepad listing what you did and to what. That way when your ready to move to the actual hosting site you can recreate what you did or just to see what would happen upload the individual files and see what happens, thus the reason to have a back up of the original file just in case something goes wrong and you need to put it back in its original state.




You are right, however, I would try to keep the connect to a minimum on your testing server or rather don't upload those databases to your trap account because I am not to sure what upload local databases to your hosting account will do. So basically all your doing with the testing server is to make sure everything you want to works together and then do a surgical graft on to the files into your hosting account.


Yes you can use the localhost folder as your source for ftp, but like I mention in my earlier statements I would be cautious of what you upload from your testing server to your actual hosting account and so basically the process you want to take is if ir is successful on the testing server go right ahead and test it on your actual account because the results could be different and so if you do a mass upload of everything and stop producing errors all over the place you will have a hard time figuring out where it is coming from.

As for Truppentool, basically you want to have a fresh copy installed on your hosting account because of how fragile they can be in terms of the url of your website and so you might produce errors as well. So basically your doing twice the workload but the benefits are great because you will be able to do it a lot faster because you know what you want and you can do it faster.




Usually it is good practice to have a copy of the original files because if you start producing some bad errors you can just replace the file just like that and then try again. Now when it comes to moving files from your testing folder to your hosting, you want to make sure you have a copy of the file your replacing just in case it errors out or the layout gets scrambled.

To be quite honest I haven't used XAMPP in years but usually when it comes to MySQL they are behind in the current version and so you want to make sure that MySQL from the hosting company is backwards capable. Then that way you won't produce any MySQL related problems, thus the reason you want to start fresh on the MySQL so not to run into any problems of inporting from your local server to your hosting account. I do believe trap has support for both MySQL 4 and MySQL and the same goes for php as well.

So yeah with my post is say is that you be doing twice the workload, but usually when your ready to set everything up on your hosting account it will go by a bit quicker.

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Thanks Saint_Michael, rvalkass, and nitish, there's a lot of great advice there for me to read through. From what I have read so far, I have got the idea that, while I can use the localhost files as the source files for my FTP uploads to my Trap17 hosting account, the necessary changes to the configuration file(s) would probably make it more straightforward if I kept the localhost files just for testing purposes. What I will do therefore is have three copies of my files. The first copy will be the extracted source files for my packages, such as Lanius, Truppentool, phpBB3, etc. I'll burn them all to a CD-R or a DVD (depending on the resulting size) and keep them handy. The second copy will be a direct copy of those source files, which I will use as my FTP upload source files for the Trap17 web hosted site. The third copy will be made from the second copy, and will go into my XAMPP folders under htdocs. I'll set up a batch file to copy everything from the second set to the third set, for when I stuff up the localhost copy during testing. I won't copy anything out of the XAMPP copy, but will use it as a test bed, and will duplicate the effort expended (on the XAMPP copy of the files) onto the FTP source files if I want to preserve anything from the XAMPP testing of my local website. This way I can keep my XAMPP files as an isolated testing area, which seems to be what Saint_Michael says here...


Another idea that I had was relating to the content. It was mentioned in this thread about not copying the content from the localhost database to the Trap17 hosted site. I understand that, thanks for the tip. What I would like to know though is the feasibility of going back the other way: copying the content from the Trap17 hosted database to my localhost database?! Is this do-able? This would enhance my testing experience on the localhost installation, as it gives me some real data to play with. Any ideas or comments?

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I believe you can export your online database by using the same phpAdmin tool mentioned above for exporting your localhost database if that's what you're asking... the tool should be installed as default on trap17 server

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This would be no problem whatsoever. Most CMS software have an inbuilt backup function, which is normally preferable to a manual backup. Take a look through the admin panel for a way to download a backup file, and save that to your PC. Then, on your local copy of the CMS, restore that backup file, and all the data from your Trap17 site will appear on your local site.

If there is no in-built backup system in the software you are using (shame on the developers!) then you can repeat the process yourself. It does exactly the same, but requires more mouse clicks

1. Open your Trap17 cPanel
2. Log in with your cPanel login details
3. Scroll down to the Database section, and click on the phpMyAdmin logo
4. On the left hand side, click the relevant database you want to back up
5. At the top of the screen, hit the Export tab
6. Tick "Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE / FUNCTION"
7. Tick "Save as file"
8. Hit Go, and save the file somewhere on your hard drive
9. Then open up phpMyAdmin on your local machine (download and install phpMyAdmin if you haven't already)
10. Click the database you're using on the left
11. Click the Import tab this time
12. Choose the file and click Go, and your data will be added to your local database

If you need help with those instructions, or downloading/setting up phpMyAdmin then feel free to ask. I seem to remember phpMyAdmin on Windows can be a little bit of a pain to initially configure sometimes (another win for Linux!) but that may have changed.

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Although burning the folders onto a CD is a smart thing just to save space on the desktop not really needed, heck get a flash drive and save them on there along with a back up with your website. Other then that your game plan sounds good, but just make sure you know which is which or you will overwrite the wrong file and might have to start over again. Yes you can export your DB's from your trap hosting account and be able to edit them within XAMMP however because MySQL databases with have the trap17 domain name running through them you would have to edit each instance and put the local host domain 127.0.0 in them to make them work. Although I am not to sure if that would really make a difference but I guess you can find out if you can get the database to work on your computer.




Yes you export them but being able to get them to work I am not aware of the process to make that work or not.

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if cms like joomla, can we use it in our hosted site without uploading from computer? like the common features just click and it will copy to our site by itself? is there such features?

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Thanks Saint_Michael, I will try downloading my Trap17 database for my CMS later, (once I have everything installed and some content uploaded), then I'll see if it works on the locahost mySQL database. I'll post my results back here, and if I can perfect this I might even write a tute about it, if no-one has done so already.

Currently I am uploading my files from the Upload directory on my hard drive up to my Trap17 public_html folder in preparation to start running the installation routines. Then I will create the mySQL databases on my Trap17 account using cPanel, and then run the installation routines for each package that will be on my site, including Lanius CMS v0.5.0, phpBB v3.0.2, phpwiki v1.3.14, and Truppentool v3.1.2. Once everything is installed, I'll start looking at setting up my external hosting sites, such as a Photobucket account for hosting my site's images, a Box.net account for hosting my FTP download files, etc. Once that is all set up, I can start putting my content into the CMS package, and then try this backup idea, copying the remote database information back to my localhost. Any advice that people can give me on any of these subjects I would appreciate it.

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