[James P]

Helping an artist to create a new portfolio website in wordpress. They have an existing site at their preferred domain, and it needs to stay up till the day the new site is loaded up. And then it has to be complete with all of the new ‘postings’ (which are actually just all their portfolio images, which are many).

So the question is, can I create a wordpress installation on a subfolder of my personal domain, load in the new theme, create all the new posts and new pages, and then, once the site is complete, export all these posts for quick and easy installation on the final domain?

I can’t just do this with a local installation, because my friend wants to review the posts as they are entered.

So – What’s the best way to do this?

[Dr Ron Suarez]

There are lots of ways to handle this.

If you want things to be fast, then you need test and production at two different IP addresses. Here is a “help” post I wrote on DNS, etc.: We Help You Understand Internet Services — Loud Feed TV Design and Development http://bit.ly/dBxSkj

Otherwise, you can just work fast and do the replacement at an off peak time for site visits.

Depending out what you have done the export from the WordPress dashboard may be sufficient. If this works, then you won’t need to worry about doing a MySQL export and import, which is more complicated and described here next.

You will need to know how to export the MySQL and then how to fix the two URL’s in the settings for the “site” and the “WordPress installation files folder” (different if WordPress is not in the root). You can change these using PHP MyAdmin, but just remember to look for both URLs to change. If I remember correctly, they get stored in the “wp_options” table.

[Daniel Wiener]

There are many ways to do this but what I do is create a separate folder on the remote site and install WordPress in that folder. Then build the site with the client’s approvals/comments along the way at example.com/folder/. Then when it is finally approved I follow the directions on giving WordPress its own directory – http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory – so that the site can be accessed at example.com/

The drawback to this method is that it will not work with a multi-site.

[James P]

Thank You Dr Ron Suarez and and Daniel Wiener, both answers are very helpful and informative – think I’m going to go forward with Daniel’s method!

[Author]

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