Change site URL's

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I work for a non-profit and their old site (a .org) was built using MS Front Page and they asked me to rebuild it.

We decided we are going to switch registrars an hosting companies so I rebuilt the site using a new domain (.info) while keeping the old site live until completion.

So now I have completed building the .info on the new hosting account (and registrar) and I want the old .org to reflect the new .info site but do not want to just do a forward to the .info(keeping it so when people type in the .org it displays the content of the .info).

I will eventually transfer the .org to the new hosting provider/registrar but I wanted to get the new site live first.

I was pretty sure that (after reading some other posts) I just had to change a few things in the site.php file but I feel that I am missing something.

Does anybody know the best practice for changing my .info to a .org?

JRick
 
emirii replied on at Permalink Reply
emirii
Make sure that pretty URLs is disabled, the .htaccess rewrite might be pointing to the .org

Other than that, site.php change should work.
JRick replied on at Permalink Reply
JRick
I just need to change that on the .info correct? Is there anything specific I need to do with the current .org?
johnpaulb replied on at Permalink Reply
johnpaulb
Hello secretsquirrel,

Most hosts use cPanel, where you can just add the ".org" as a "Parked" domain. Here is a simple guide:
http://www.webhostinghub.com/support/edu/cpanel/203-manage-domains/...

Then, after you point the ".org" site's DNS to the new host, it will show the same website, under both addresses.

I hope this helps,
John-Paul
Benji replied on at Permalink Reply
Benji
Neither of the answers above are properly addressing your question. Since you want to keep the two domains hosted separately for now, you don't need to change your DNS for the .org one yet. And whatever you're trying to do with the site.php file, it sounds like you're going about it backwards -- that would be if you wanted people to type in the .info domain and be shown the .org -- but you're trying to do the opposite.

However, if you want to pull this off the way you're thinking, it might be tricky. And depending on your .org's hosting environment, it might be impossible. I don't know anything about MS Frontpage (it's a WYSIWYG, right?) so it makes me wonder whether you even have an Apache web server at the .org hosting. If so, and if you have the proper permissions, you might be able to mod_rewrite that entire site over to the .info site silently by adding something like this to your .htaccess or httpd.conf file at the .org domain:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.info/$1 [P]


This instructs the server that anytime someone attempts to visit yoursite.org, it should instead fetch yoursite.info without changing the URL in the browser address bar. Same with yoursite.org/anything -- it fetches yoursite.info/anything.

Sounds great in theory, but what makes it especially tricky is that it's a completely different domain you're wanting to rewrite to without a full redirect, and that requires in addition to the rewrite module, another module called mod_proxy. That's the significance of the [P] flag at the end of the RewriteRule (force proxy). So you have to make sure that mod_proxy is enabled. And it would be to your advantage also to put this rule in the httpd.conf file if possible.

Here's a forum thread with someone trying to solve the same problem:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=631281...

If you're trying to do this on a web server other than Apache, I don't know how to help you. And if you're on shared hosting with limited permissions and can't turn on mod_proxy or do what you need to do, you're probably out of luck. But otherwise it's worth a shot -- just be prepared for some headaches if it doesn't work off the bat.

If it's critical that the website be up and accessible during all this, I would highly recommend that you don't do the above and instead just change the DNS on the .org domain to the new host. At the new host, you can probably just make the .org domain be an alias of the .info domain and not have a redirect (but be sure to check with your host first). There's no need to change the registrar at the same time -- you can do that anytime later. Overall, it's a much surer path than mod_rewrite nonsense.

Best of luck,
Benji
JRick replied on at Permalink Reply
JRick
I think you may be right on this one, I will look more into it. And yes, Front Page is a WYSIWYG HTML editor which I believe Microsoft has discontinued. I attempted to build my C5 site on their server but was having issues.
INTcommunications replied on at Permalink Reply
INTcommunications
You are right Benji - Frontpage was Microsoft's answer to web development and yes it almost always on Windows servers - so that would be the first check.
INTcommunications replied on at Permalink Reply
INTcommunications
You need to add the DNS at the domain name registrar. if it's GOdaddy or whoever phone them and ask them to add DNS records to the original domain name so that the old goes to the new.
But it sounds to me like you are just building the new and once it is finished you want the old to go straight to the new.
If you are just building and want the old one up while you are building the new one. You should always build the new one with a robots.txt file telling Googlebot or whomever to disallow all the pages - this stops Google from indexing the new site and then punishing you for duplicate content - then build the new site and on the old site have your host do a permanent redirect. If you are trying to preserve indexing in search engines this is imperative also make sure your new pages match the old - i.e. youroldsite.org/about-us.html should now be yournewsite.info/about-us.html - If the permanent redirect is in place Google will know that you are just changing domain names then it is good to go in the Search Engine.

JIm
JRick replied on at Permalink Reply
JRick
Well, got this one figured out.


I built the new site on a .info and when that was done I did the following:

1). I added the following line of code to the site.php file of the .info site.
define('BASE_URL', 'http://yourwebsite.org');


2). I then had the old hosting company change the DNS settings of the .org site to reflect the DNS of the .info.

3) After that was done I added the .org as a parked domain to my .info's control panel.