Have built a site for my son's swim team and converting the site to Xoops. So, right now the site exists as static pages with XOOPS as just a folder inside the site "www.site.com/xoops/html/". Did this so original site would not be disturbed. We are in the process of moving to XOOPS permanently. Can I drag everything out of the Xoops's html folder and over-write existing site? Will I break the XOOPS site? Or should I just use a redirect script in the original Index page?

you can move your site from "www.site.com/xoops/html/"

to "www.site.com/html/" with little to no problem, just make sure you tell the mainfile.php where you placed all the sites content.

I was hoping to move it to "www.site.com/index.php. Is this possible?

Yes of course....in fact looks far better being in the root folder....move it first...then just edit mainfile.php to the correct settings and it moves the site....

Oh and as for the original site, depends on what sort of files remain in your root folder...i.e..an index.html will load before the index.php of Xoops.....

Make sure there are no files that could be muddled by a browser and you can have files and folders sitting in Xoops....as long as main XOOPS files are there....

As wizanda stted yes.

you can see HERE and HEREbolth these sites are XOOPS and bolth are in the root files.

ONE IMPORTANT POINT! If you have made any URLs with http://domain.com/sub_folder/etc in a custom block or hacks in templates you MUST edit the database to show the new paths ie: http://domain.com/etc Now save the database and replace this with the existing. If you dont do this these paths will not be correct.

That's what I thought. I've used smartsections and multimenu to build my pages and links and I believe they ALL saved the pages created in the database as http://www.site.com/xoops/html/module/smartscetion.....etc. All my links will have to be changed.
Which seems hugely time consuming for me to adjust in the database. Maybe not?
Maybe easier just to put a redirect in the header of the main index page and leave it at that. Not being paid for all this work.

In Multimenu it can have short url...so as to be:

modules/something/index.php

That then won't need changing so much...and will auto configure...

Quote:

You're probably right. For future reference, if you do more site conversions, I have converted a number of sites from old static HTML to Xoops, and I do the development right in the main (default) html folder, and no one ever notices until I bring the site live. You just set the site to "closed" except for your webmaster login, and that's only so if someone happens to stumble on http://www.yoursite.com/index.php-- since index.html takes precedence for visitors to the root folder of the site (http://www.yoursite.com/), no one really ever would find your site under development, and if they did, they could not register/login and view anything, since the site is closed.

The ONLY possible problem with this is if the html site happens to use a folder called "images" in the root directory. I avoid that by doing a global search and replace on the html files and change that folder to ~images or _images or graphics.

In any case, the only little headache with doing it this way is that clicking the "home" link on your XOOPS site during the dev always brings you back to the html homepage, but I often add a hidden "index.php" link to get me quickly back.

As things are getting wrapped up, I identify any of the html files in the site which are commonly found with search engines and create (but do not yet upload) custom redirects with those exact .html names which redirects to the corresponding new module/page on the dev site, including one for index.html which meta refreshes instantly to index.php.

As soon as the XOOPS site is ready and tested and "opened", I just upload all the new custom redirect html pages to overwrite what is there and "viola!", your site is live, and anyone coming from a search engine to mysite.com/businessdirectory.html is instantly redirected to the new mysite.com/modules/mxdirectory/ for example.

You could also just delete the index.html, and anyone coming to the root directory of the domain would then go directly to your XOOPS site's index.php, but just in case anyone gets a link to the index.html file from a search engine or a linking site, or has mysite.com/index.html in their bookmarks/favorites, I think it's a good idea to have the redirect, but others' may have a different way to deal with this.

In any case, doing it as above completely avoids the problem you were facing above.

Good luck! T

EDIT-- I researched this more and found that refresh metatags have been the source of a lot of abuse, so search engines actually disregard them. Editing the .htaccess file in the root folder is actually a better solution. I just did it on one of my sites, it took 10 minutes, and then I deleted all the old html files. The syntax in the .htaccess file is:


or



Great explanation at: http://www.stevenhargrove.com/redirect-web-pages/

Don't bother with redirects, they are tricky with search engines and a messy way to do things. The issue with changing your site URL in the database should not be a problem, providing you have a decent Text editor

Simply open the previously saved database and do a 'find & Replace' to change your URL No replace this changed version over the old DB.

Dont attempt this in windows notepad as your DB will probably be too large for it to open.