There are several good posts that describe in detail how to copy a hosted DNN website to your local computer.  One of the better posts is at

http://www.dnncreative.com/Forum/tabid/88/view/topic/forumid/4/postid/1919/Default.aspx

Note that the first step in all these procedures is to go to Admin / Site Settings /Portal Aliases
and add a New HTTP Alias for the address that you wish to use for your locahost installation:

    for example, localhost/yourdirname

 The main problem with these approaches is that when the destination (copied) website is run in a development environment such as Visual Studio 2005, Visual Web Developer or even directly in IIS, all files referred by a relative path in HTML are not recognized. 

For example, assume that you want to copy a website that resides on a hosted web server to your local computer. This web server's files are stored in the /wwwroot directory on the web server and for consistency you would also copy all these files in a \wwwroot directory on your local computer. For convinience, all paths imbedded in HTML on the web server should be relative instead of absolute.  "/mypath/myfile.jpg"  would be a relative path whereas "http://mywebsite.com/mypath/myfile.jpg" is an absolute path. When testing the copied website, the easy way to check this problem is to look at your graphics files on the copied site.   If the files use relative paths, the graphics files are not displayed on any web page of the copied website.

When encoutering this error, the first place to check is the  PortalAlias.HTTPAlias column in the database.  The column should contain an entry for 

    localhost:9999/wwwroot where 9999 is the http port of the local host. 

This value is set in DNN using the Admin / Site Settings /Portal Aliases menu before the hosted web site is copied.

The next place to look would be the settings on the local web server.  From discussing this issue with other developers, the problem occurs on both the Visual Studio 2005 ASP.NET Development Web Server and IIS 6.   Both servers allow you to specify a Virtual Path and Root URL:

Virtual Path:  /wwwroot

Root URL:  http://localhost:9999/wwwroot

Changing either of these settings to Virtual Path:  / or Root URL:  http://localhost:9999/  does not resolve the problem.

At this point I am open to suggestions.

Thanks,

Stefan Pantu

Computer Software Connection, Inc.

southfloridakiteboarding.com

I see your point.  Instead of "/mypath/myfile.jpg" I should have used ".../mypath/myfile.jpg" in the text above.

I skewed the defenition of absolute and relative paths to conform to this problem.  Any path that is not prefixed with the server name (for example, ".../mypath/myfile.jpg") breaks in the copied web site.  I called this a relative path. 

Stefan