Oxford Area School District > Technology > Web Site Manual
Moving the site from one server to another
Steps 1-4 should only be performed by the administrator of the entire web site. Of course, no one else should be making changes at the same time. All steps should be completed during the same work session. After completion of these steps, every person working on any part of the web site will need to synchronize their web folders as shown in step 5.
Step 1 of 5: Make sure that the computer being used to perform steps 2 and 3 has all of the most recent web site files.
Make sure the Dreamweaver site being used for this step is the one for the top-level, site-wide web directory. In the site definition, the host directory should simply be a / slash indicator.
From Dreamweaver's Site menu, choose "Synchronize Sitewide..."
In the window above, choose "Synchronize: Entire 'web site name'" and 'Direction: 'Get newer files from remote'".
Click Preview, check the file list for any incongruencies, then click OK.
Step 2 of 5: Change the main menu for all of the site pages.
The site menu is a Javascript file, located here: /shared/menu.js
The site menu file is very "sensitive" to captilization and punctuation. As a precautionary menu, it is recommended to make a backup copy of the last working menu.js file before proceed with any changes. To do this in Dreamweaver, right-click on the file name and select Edit > Duplicate. By default, the backup copy will be called "Copy of menu.js".
In Dreamweaver, use Edit menu > Find and Replace... to do a global replacement withing the current file of all of the web server references. An example is shown here for moving from webtraining to another server. Use "Replace All" to update the entire file at once.
Step 3 of 5: Within each sub-site, change the template files for each of the sub-sites.
The top-level templates (located in the /Templates folder) use relative links and do not need to be changed when the site is moved from one web server to another. The lower-level templates are located in the 5 folders for the respective schools: /ers/Templates, /jbs/Templates, /ns/Templates, /pgs/Templates, /oahs/Templates.
To do this step, it is important to select a different Dreamweaver site defitinion that matches the sub-site that will be changed.
For the respective /Templates folder, use the Find and Replace... command to change all of the absolute links to refer to the new server address.
Step 4 of 5: Synchronize all of the files back to the web server.
Make sure the Dreamweaver site being used for this step is the one for the top-level, site-wide web directory. In the site definition, the host directory should simply be a / slash indicator.
From Dreamweaver's Site menu, choose "Synchronize Sitewide..."
In the window above, choose "Synchronize: Entire 'web site name'" and 'Direction: Put newer files to remote'".
Click Preview, check the file list for any incongruencies, then click OK.
Step 5 of 5: All others working on the web site need to synchronize the files from the web server.
Once steps 1-4 have been completed, all of the webmasters for any part of the site will need to update the local copy of their files. To do this, they would need to use the Dreamweaver site definition appropriate for their part of the web site.
From Dreamweaver's Site menu, choose "Synchronize Sitewide..."
In the window above, choose "Synchronize: Entire 'web site name'" and 'Direction: 'Get newer files from remote'".
Click Preview, check the file list for any incongruencies, then click OK.
