Working on site behind the scenes before going live ?!?

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Hi there -

 

I have searched all over the boards for this, and must not be searching correctly because I can't find an answer.

 

I have a live wordpress site up right now.   Changing my format to ecommerce and will be installing prestashop.   I do not want my current site to be down while I prepare my Prestashop site, and I do not want it to be in 'pardon our dust mode' either .

 

Is there an easy (step by step, please) way to load prestashop without going live just yet?

 

I've been away from Prestashop for some time, and thought there was a way to do this before.

 

Thank you kindly in advance...

[Dh42]

The easiest way to do something like this is to get another hosting account and set PrestaShop up there. Then edit your hosts file to point your domain to the new site locally, you will be the only one that can see it while you work on it. Then when it gets time to launch you can just switch your dns settings and close down the other hosting account. 

 

There are a myriad of ways to do this, using sub domains, and other ways, but this one is more than likely the easiest. 

[Alexander.X]

I guess, the question is not about Prestashop, but site administration.

 

I usually have more than one instance of my project, including dev.mydomain.com, test.mydomain.com, and [www.]mydomain.com ()for developen, sraging and production at the same time. sometimes some of them are hosted on different servers.

So, I dont see why you cant have two totally different websites (including different engines) as a subdomains of your domains.

Btw, depends on your goals, you may want to have the WP ans PS production sites at the same time (like project.com for shop and blog.myproject.ru for wp-blog, or smth like this).

 

Speaking about how to do that - Dh42 said right things. Make new A-record in your DNS for new subdomain, make another website, and let them live simultaneously while your are working on you new site (usually, you can even use one hosting account and one IP=address for different websites for different subdomains, you just have to configure your webserver to handle different subdomains|domains at one server.

[selectshop.at]

You can also install Prestashop o a sub-folder on your host and seet permissions on this folder with cPanel. In this case only you can access to this folder and test Prestashop (clone or whatever) on your host without any interruption of other live site.

[musicmaster]

The question is very broad and doesn't disclose much about your experience and ideas. That makes it difficult to answer.

 

 - Your first problem is converting the data. There are services and software for that and maybe you wrote something yourself.

 - After you have transferred the data to a Prestashop installation you very likely will want to customize the software. Depending on your demands that may take quite some time. The best way to do that is on a localhost as that saves you the uploading of modifications.

 - Your next step will then be the uploading of the modified shop. That is endlessly discussed on the forum.

 - In the end you will want to run the data conversion once again so that the new shop starts up-to-date.

 - I have some doubts whether you should take another server. Renaming directories is a very quick way to switch content and it saves you the time that a DNS change takes. Don't forget to cleanse the cache.