Easiest way to duplicate site?

Here’s the deal: we built a site for this company. They have international sites too (two of them), and now they want to make them to look like the new site. So, I was thinking since the content of the site is going to be a bit different for each site, I’d just triplicate the new site, and they can translate the contents they want and I’ll delete the rest once they figure out what stays, what goes.

So my question is: what would be the easiest way to go about doing this? I’m gonna go with separate MODx installations (and preferably separate MySQL databases), so essentially what I need is a way to copy the whole MODx installation and paste it somewhere else on the server, and then modify the content so they can translate the stuff that stays. I’ve already learned that there are several ways of doing this, but as I’ve not looked into the latest version, I was wondering if I should go with that?

Thanks for your help and feedback, folks, I really appreciate your time and effort.

1. Drop the entire DB in phpmyadmin as mydb.sql
2. On the new servers, create an empty DB for each new install of MODx
3. Run the sql file mydb.sql using phpmyadmin on these new databases.
4. Ftp all your files into the webroot fo the new sites.

Your done!

Just ensure the DB info in the config.inc.php is correct.
Note you may need to turn off friendly urls depending on .htaccess in the new site.

Be careful with creating exact duplicated of websites. Google sees this a duplicate content, and can remove the duplicate sites from their index.

you’ll need to then run the upgrade as well so that it corrects the file paths etc.

Quote from: paulp at Sep 08, 2009, 07:18 AM

you’ll need to then run the upgrade as well so that it corrects the file paths etc.

Forgot this! Yes you can do this or set them in the Configuration yourself...

Thanks! I’m currently installing phpmyadmin. Will let you know how it all went.

Hello, just a brief post to let you know that all went well. Phpmyadmin didn’t let me import the .sql file as it was about 2GB, but I managed to do it using SSH.

I also set up robots.txt to ignore the (for now) duplicate content. Thanks for your help!

Quote from: jsor at Sep 22, 2009, 02:23 AM

.sql file as it was about 2GB

Your joking right? 2gb!!!! What have you got in there, google’s index?

Heh, no I’m not joking. It’s a quite large website for this ready built homes manufacturer.

Quote from: jusmeig at Sep 08, 2009, 05:56 AM

1. Drop the entire DB in phpmyadmin as mydb.sql

Let me strongly suggest that this should be "Dump" or (better) "Export" rather than "Drop" since a naive user following this step could delete their entire MODX database.

2GB sounds like you’ve got huge manager access logs and event logs.