As a follow up on this blog post, i will use this postto answer frequently asked questions about "how to move a dnn installation from one pc/server to another". If you have any questions that you feel are not answered here or in the original post, please just start a new thread in this forum and i will pick them up. If you feel i am not prompt enough.. you can always remind me on my support mail: support@apollo-software.nl. Please point to this thread in your mail, so i know where you come from....
Q. What if one is developing on an XP box and deploying to an IIS shared hosting situation?
A. It doesn't matter what version of IIS you are using, just copy over all files from the root of your dnn instance down. ie. if your local site is located in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\dotnetnuke, just copy all files under the dotnetnuke folder to the root of your hosting environment
Q. What if one is using SQL Server Express rather than SQL 2005?
A. The only difference would be if you are using a SQL Server Express user instance. From the top of my head, you could convert such a db to a real sql server database, after which the procedure is the same as i described. If you want to know how to convert a user instance, have a look at this article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264564.aspx
Q. How does one move a single portal from a DNN database to another, especially when the portal ID has to change, and you don't want to lose any portal content in the database?
A. The simple answer is: you can't. You will run into numerous problems. It is not possible to insert an existing dnn portal into another dnn install. The only option would be to use the portal export feature, however, that is far from optimal. Even then: links to files in your portal (for instance images in text/html module will use the following path: /portals/[portalid]/[filename]. If the portal id changes, you would need to fix all references manually)
Q. What if i am restoring a site on a different server, the URL of the restored site is different, and i did not add the new http alias in the old site?
A You can manualy add a new portal alias by entering new record in the table PortalAlias. Enter the proper PortalID (0 for your first portal), and a proper alias (whithout "http://" ). You need to do this before you browse to the new site for the first time. DNN caches the entries in the PortalAlias table, so if the record is added after the first request to the site it will not be seen. Should this happen (ie, you are redirected back to the URL of the old site), just recycle the app pool, or reset IIS to clear the cache completely.