Hello:

We built a multi-site Joomla website within our test environment. Now we want to move it to our production environment.

With all other Joomla sites we zip up the files, backup the database and move the files to the new server, upload the database and then edit the configuration.php file. Joomla site is now installed.

With multisite it does not work this way. What is your recommended approach to moving a Joomla multi-site from one server to another server?

Thanks,
Jay Murphy

When moving a site from one environment to another one, you may have to ajust manually all the symbolic links.

In general, I personnaly delete all the symbolic link and ask JMS Multisites rebuld them from the Manage Site and Open / Resave the slave site.

If the environment has a different directory structure, you may perhaps have to change manually some full path that might be stored into the multisites configuration files.

If you also have choose to share some extension with the master website, you may also have to check the sessions cookies (in case where the domain is not the same).

If you have share some extension, you must also take care about the DB to ensure that you restore the links correctly.
The best is to keep the same DB name.
If this is not the case, you may have to edit the SQL file corresponding to the export of the DB that you will have to update manually to reflect the new links with the new DB name.

The complexity depends on the number of differences that you have between your develpment and production environment.

I have already assist some customer with billable support to do such things and this require approximativelly 3 hours on plaftorm using cPanel.