Subdomain issues are breaking my new site

Raven Falls · 2014-04-18 07:02:53

And it was all looking so easy -- too easy...

I'm hosted at JustHost. My main domain name is JDW-Media.com. I have my pre-CE3 website set up in public_html/raven_falls, which can be accessed directly at http://www.jdw-media.com/raven_falls, and I have had the domain ravenfallsphotography.com as an assigned domain pointing to that directory.

When I started building my CE3 website, I put it in a folder at the same level, public_html/ravenfalls, and set /ravenfalls/ as the Site Root, which enabled me to directly access it during setup and testing via http://www.jdw-media.com/ravenfalls. I got everything set up right, and was ready to go live, so I went to JustHost's control panel and reassigned ravenfallsphotography.com from public_html/raven_falls to public_html/ravenfalls.

I suppose you can all guess what happened next...

When I browsed to ravenfallsphotography.com, it loaded, but as a text-only version of the website. Checking the various links revealed, probably to no one else's surprise, that they all were referencing http://www.ravenfallsphotography.com/ravenfalls/, which obviously doesn't exist. (I've since reassigned the domain name to point to the old website for the moment.)

Is the only option of fixing this to go back and change all the templates so the Site Root is now http://ravenfallsphotography.com/ (or "/" for simplicity) and then rebuilding, re-uploading, and re-publishing everything? I suppose I can do that, except that I would then have one of two major problems: 1) if I don't reassign the domain first, I would be unable to test my work, as all the links for ravenfallsphotography.com would then still be pointing to non-existent places in public_html/raven_falls instead of the directory in which I was building the new site, or 2) if I did reassign the domain first, it would mean that, during the hours (or more) it took me to re-upload, re-publish, and test the site, any customers would be treated to a jumble of a half-built site, which would look utterly unprofessional.

Are those the only two choices I have? Or is there some other alternative? I noticed this thread: http://community.theturninggate.net/post/2020/#p2020, which almost sounds like I'm experiencing something similar to those working on GoDaddy servers. Would this approach be likely to work in my case? And, if so, since that only refers to AutoIndex (and, thus, needs to change only one .php file), how would I go about making similar modifications to a whole site, including publisher, cart, and search internals? Thanks for any help you can give me on this!

Last edited by Raven Falls (2014-04-18 08:17:28)

rod barbee · 2014-04-18 08:19:55

Is the only option of fixing this to go back and change all the templates so the Site Root is now http://ravenfallsphotography.com/ and then rebuilding, re-uploading, and re-publishing everything?

Sadly, I believe so.

Have you tried creating an actual subdomain (your post doesn't mention it explicitly) and then recreating the entire site there? You'd still need to change your Site Root references in Pages and all Publisher templates and any individual indexes or galleries you have, but at least you can do it out of public site. If sub-domains at JustHost work like they should, you could then simply use / in the Site Root field.
Once you're sure it's working like it should you could just assign the ravenfallsphotography domain name to the sub-domain folder and be done with it. Which is what I've done with a couple of sites, one built with TTG CE2 components and another with CE3 Pages

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#1 2014-04-18 07:02:53

Subdomain issues are breaking my new site

#2 2014-04-18 08:19:55

Re: Subdomain issues are breaking my new site

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