01225 571 707

If you're like us you will probably develop Joomla sites on a local server (we use XAMPP) before moving to your live server. I recommend doing this, especially for a site overhaul, as it's a far better method than creating a bunch of folders for test sites on your live server (many of which are forgotten... how often do you see this: http:///mysite.com/newSite).

If you haven't already doscovered it you should be using JoomlaPack, an invaluable extension for Joomla which is available for free. There is an excellent article written by JoomlaTraining with much more detail than you will find here. For anyone other than a novice Joomla administrator we've put together a quick guide to site migration.

1. Download and install the JoomlaPack component (v 2.3.1 at the time of writing)
2. Now you need to download (to your local machine) the JoomlaPack archive file which by default you will find in: /administrator/components/com_joomlapack/backup (relative to yout Joomla root folder).
3. Upload this JoomlaPack archive file to the web root folder of your destination server.
4. Download the kickstart.php file and then upload this to the same folder as the JoomlaPack archive.
5. Run the kickstart by browsing to http://yoursite.com/kickstart.php and follow the very simple instructions.

WARNING if you are using IIS hosting you may find that having run the kickstart, installed Joomla then allowed kickstart to remove the installation folder and archive file it creates a .htaccess file. On our hosting company this then causes an error 500 and the website won't work. Just delete or rename this .htaccess file

This shortened guide assumes that you have already created / have available a MySQL database on the destination server. Full details on this are in the JoomlaTraining article.