Migrating from a local development

Thanks in most part to a bunch of you guys here on these forums, I will be wrapping up development on my first MODx site very soon (within the week most likely). I have been developing locally using MAMP (the same as WAMP, on;y for the Mac).

Because the site I am developing is a redesign of an existing site with a fairly sizable catalog of items, I’ve decided getting the local site on parity with the live site and then migrating it is the best path for me.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard some horror stories about migrating a database driven site from a local development to a live site and I was wondering since I’ve gotten such great advice here during the course of my development if anyone had any tricks, tips, checklists, etc. that would make my site migration a little smoother.

Any sort of advice would be appreciated, however small you may think it is for you. It could save me some future headaches.

Thanks again!

First of all, see here.
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Moving_Site_To_Another_Location

I’ve never had any problems except for database incompatibilities. To avoid that, make sure that the database on the remote server is created to use the same character set and collation as your development server. Sometimes the remote MySQL is a much older version than your development version. Especially if it happens to be one that was particularly buggy, it will cause problems.

The only thing you can do to avoid problems like this is to pay attention to the MySQL version when choosing a remote host, and as best you can imitate it in your development environment. Having the latest, most up-to-date versions of PHP and MySQL on your development system won’t be of much help if you’re transferring it to an old, poorly configured remote system with inflexible or ignorant support.

I developed a 4-language site that ended up on a hosting system that had their very old version of MySQL set to dec-8, which was a very common character set in Europe years ago. Their client application was also very old, so I could not modify the database default settings. We had nothing but trouble with it; they finally moved to a host that allowed us to set up our own database, and after some initial problems getting the data ported, everything has gone smoothly.