Two versions of the same site?!?

[T.J]

Hi all!

Have an existing site in Catalog 6 that has been up and running for a while now and want to make some pretty big changes to the design and product layout. The problem is I want to leave the current site as it is and operational whilst the design is tested etc. Does anyone know how to do this?

Have already tried licensing a new site and then copying "site1" into the new "site2" folder but Actinic wont allow this as the site keys aren't unique. The other option I considered was having a "site1a" and a "site1b" and renaming them to suit but this would cause problems as we have other software linking to the site1 database. It’s also not practical to install a copy of Actinic on to another machine and I’m fresh out of ideas, lol!

Just to clarify I’m not trying to overcome Actinic’s licensing all I need is a way to have two copies of the same site, one live and operational and the other for testing with the aim of replacing the operational site with this test copy.

Thanks in advance
Liam

[garyhay]

You could create a section that uses a different Act_Primary and alter product templates etc in this section only. Not agreat solution but the only one apart from Developer that I can think of at the moment.

[T.J]

Originally posted by garyhay
You could create a section that uses a different Act_Primary and alter product templates etc in this section only. Not agreat solution but the only one apart from Developer that I can think of at the moment.

Thanks for the quick reply! Just had another thought....... Is it possible to install a clean copy of Actinic into a different location on the same pc and use this second copy to run the test site?

Cheers
Liam

[Jan]

We use VMWare to create 'virtual machines' on a single machine for our development sites - this allows you to have lots of different version of Actinic running on one machine or lots of different versions of the same site. The Virtual machines have their own local webservers (ie apache - see advanced user guides for details of how to set up). It works well.

Regards,

[JMK2]

I used Jan's solution to test our site when I was having all sorts of problems and it worked great. When I found that a clean install solved our problems then I just overwrote the original installation and then copied site 1 back into it and imported the snapshot from the VMWare version, changed a few of the relevant network settings to reflect this and the problems were resolved. Sure beat trying to debug all the problems one by one. I was unaware of VMWare until she suggested it, what a great program. The only problem I have noticed with it is when it is running it seem to cause my Windows Explorer window to keep blinking as it refreshes which is a minor annoyance.