Advice On Copying Sections from One Site to Another

[nanodac]

Hi all,

We as a company currently have online one old version of our main website (Site A), which acts as a sort of department store if you will for all the different brands that we sell. We also have a series of 'minisites' (Site 1, Site 2 etc.) for each of these brands, most of which have been created and uploaded in the last few years, to varying degrees of success.

This is where I come in. Our 'Site A' was produced by my predecessor and has had its catalog suspended for the past year or so and has not been updated in even longer. My next project is to develop a new version of this site using Actinic. This will obviously be quite a time consuming job. The new site (Site B) will have the same domain as 'Site A' and largely the same product base.

I have made a test site for 'Site B' and have attempted to copy over all the existing sections and products from 'Site A' and from 'Sites 1, 2 & 3'. I did this by doing the standard copy from one site and paste into another with mixed results.

I have read other posts on a similair topic but they all seem to be for older versions of Actinic, whilst I struggled to find anything on this in either the standard of advanced user guides. I am basically looking for a suggestion of the most effective way of doing this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I am using Actinic Business V10 fully updated.

Thanks, and sorry for the essay!

[leehack]

Use a snapshot to copy a site, then just delete items not required. No need to copy paste.

[nanodac]

I was thinking of doing this, however I am copying content from a variety of sites, will it not overwrite one with the other?

[tobyharris]

If your old site is in an older version, you could take a snap shot of using the older actinic and then import it into a dummy site in v10. This will help to upgrade the data before you transfer it.

Once your old site data is in the dummy v10, you can then copy and past the sections you require into your new site..

Just a word of warning, any file references, such as image locations,templates and any additional files may become invalid as the data will not exist in the new site folders until you copy the files across.

You may also get some duplicate product codes, page names warnings if copy products into the new site when another version of the same product, section or image already exists.

Although this does sound like a long winded process, I find it does allow you to build up the new site with complete control.

Hope this helps

[nanodac]

Hi Toby,

Thanks for that. I have tried this and it has worked well.

One small problem however. When I have copied a section from one of the minisites, I received the following error and I don't have a clue how to rectify it. Thoughts?

[tobyharris]

Hi nanodac,
I think I have had this problem.

Check the original site tax setting and replicate them in the new site (this is in Business Settings - Tax) then re-import products / sections. Once you have imported / copied all new products /sections into the new site, the TAX settings can then be changed if required.

If you want to correct it without doing the above you will need to change the "sTax1OpaqueData" value in the products table of the database for each product with the error. To do this, create a product in the new site with the correct tax setting. Then go into the products table and find the "sTax1OpaqueData" value for the product you created, copy this and then find the "sTax1OpaqueData" value of a product with the error. Highlight the "sTax1OpaqueData" column then do a "find and replace" to change all the old values with the new value.

REMEMBER- TAKE A BACKUP OF THE MDB FILE BEFORE YOU START THIS PROCESS

Hope this helps

[nanodac]

That worked brilliantly Toby thanks so much! (I went with the first option)