Hi!

I'm hoping someone can offer some advice.  I'm new to DNN (just started with it in March) and am not a .net developer... and, this is my first site.  So, I'm sure there are things that I'm just not getting (and likely doing wrong).

I have two installations of DNN 4.8.1 - one on my domain mysite.com and one on a subdomain test.mysite.com.  We used the test.mysite.com to get things set up and test and what-not before putting everything into our live site (we are 4 moms that are working together to put this site up and, as we each have our own jobs, work on this at night at our own homes, so instead of working on a local installation, I created this "test" subdomain to do our initial work and testing).

To "move" everything to our live site, we (ok, I) just recreated everything on mysite.com that we had finalized in "test" in our "live". 

During our recreation, we actually made several modifications, as we refined what we wanted.  Now, what I wanted to do was to "copy" our entire live site to our test site so that I could start testing out some skin changes and other module changes (we have some purchased modules that have new versions, but I want a test area to apply the upgrades before we apply them to our live site).

I hope this all makes sense so far.

So... I found Mitchel's nice articles about backups, restores, and the one on migrating a local installation to a hosted site.  I used as the basis of what I've done.

I made a backup of the live db, asked my host providers to use that to restore to my test db, while I downloaded the entire root directory.  Then, I removed the directories for the subdomains from the backup of the files (we have two subdomains... our test and one that is company.mysite.com that I have a separate dnn installation, intended for a site for us and our contractors to use for other purposes) and a couple of other subdirectories that were already present in the wwwroot directory, that were there when we first set up the domain with the hosting provider (one called "website" and another called "cgi-bin" - these were both empty and did not map to any directory that was already in the test directory, or my local dnn installation, so they didn't seem to apply).

The db restore was successful, so I copied all the files to the test directory (minus, like I said, the "company", "test" and extraneous subdirectories).  I modified the web.config to update the db connection information to point to the test db (in both places).

Now, when I go to test.mysite.com, I see what appears to be our live site, but all links actually go to our live site. 

I'm sure that I'm either just missing a step or have made an error in judgement in thinking it would be this straight-forward.

Does anyone have any suggestions or see where I went wrong?

Thanks so much!

Paula

You are a life saveer!

I actually found the PortalAlias table last night, just hunting around in the db trying to find something and updated it ... but when I went back, it still wasn't working, so I assumed there must be more ...

I didn't know that updating the web.config would restart the application... I have so much to learn!

Thank you so much! I'm learning a lot on your site.  I appreciate the effort it takes to put this together - it's really nice!

paula