Moving an existing site to modx

I have an existing site that I would like to port to modx. I know I could develop locally using XLAMP but because we will be a couple of us doing the work and working in different time zones, I would like to make the port on the existing server.

I am planning to install modx in a subdirectory of my existing website http://www.MySite.com/modx/ and do the installation from there. That way both of us will be able to convert the existing PHP scripts, documents, and DB to modx.

Q: Am i going to mess up my existing site by doing the procedure above? I do not think the installation will do anything in http://MySite.com/ ?

Once the work is done, is there a way to redirect MySite.com/ to MySite/modx/ maybe using .htaccess rewrite rules or should we just reinstall into the root folder?

Thanks!

I am in no means an expert on this, but to answer your questions:

1. MODx shouldn’t do anything to your existing site, and only people who know about the /modx directory will be able to find it. (Nonetheless I would suggest either working with your MODx site ’offline’ which won’t let anyone see the work in progress, or using an .htaccess to password protect the directory. If you make your site ’offline’ in the configuration [under tools] you will still be able to see everything while you are logged into the manager).

2. After the site is finished, you can use DNS to point people to the /modx directory as the root folder; I don’t know exactly how to do it, but your host should be able to help you set it up. (I’m pretty sure on this point).

Hope that helps.

A sub dir will be fine, just make sure if possible you password protect that entire folder as you dont want google or users crawling a development site.

When you are finished I would suggest you move the contents of /MODx to the / root of your website then run the MODx install again selecting upgrade.

You could rewrite traffic to that dir but it would make more sense just to move the contents of the MODx dev site to the root of the domain.

Aaron.