Hi,

What is the normal procedure for moving a site from one server to another?

A couple of problems showed up when trying to move a Plone site from Mac OS X to Sun Solaris.

Two different ways were attempted.

1. Moving data.fs. This worked very well when moving between two Mac OS X machines. The difference is that this time (when moving to the Sun machine), only the data.fs file was moved. When moving between the OS X machines, the whole "Default" folder containing the Plone site was moved.

Anyway, when starting Plone on the Sun machine after moving the data.fs file, a load of errors are generated. Most of them seem to be related to the physical paths to various locations of the Plone installation on the OS X machine get moved over to the Sun machine, where Plone is not in the same physical location.

Is this normal, and how can we fix it?

2. Exporting and importing The second approach was to go to the ZMI, select the Plone site, click Import/Export, Download to local machine (XML format NOT checked), and then import that file on the Sun machine. This works better. No errors, and the site can be accessed. However, there is a problem with URLs. The value for portal_url seems to differ, with the name of the Plone site being added on the Sun machine, something that does not seem to happen on OS X. What this means is that since many URLs are relative to the site's root, eg '/css/main.css', those files aren't found. On the Sun machine, '/' seems to refer to the Zope root, while on the OS X setup it is the root of the Plone site. We're looking at possible differences in Apache virtual host and url rewrite configurations, but can't find anything obvious.

So, I'm interested in knowing if anyone has run into similar troubles when moving a Plone site from one server to another, any pointers to instructions/best practices for doing so, and any help in general when it comes to this stuff.

/Roger