Staging Site with Drupal One-Click? or Separate sub-domain?

#1

Hi there…

I am trying to migrate an out-of-date WP/Blog (which will be nuked) to a clean-slate Drupal website and have a bunch of questions:

So, I created a One-Click install of Drupal in staging.website.com

The new staging site came up, but two things didn’t happen which made me kinda uneasy about migration…so I REALLY need help with this before I go any further.
[list=1]
[]No sub-domain, staging.website.com, shows up under Web Panel->Manage Domains. It seems to have created a directory called staging.website.com, though. Does this seem right?
[]No new MySQL Database was created…so I am wondering how am I supposed to copy over the Drupal database when I go live? Where did One-Click put it?
[/list]
Main question: Would I be better off (cleaner for migration) “manually” doing the following?
[list=1]
[]creating a sub-domain staging.website.com
[]then creating a corresponding staging MySQL Database
[*]then installing Drupal directly
[/list]

#2

Yes, yes, and yes. The drupal one-click is garbage. It only allows a simple install which puts the files in a central location inaccessible to you. You would not be able to make any custom changes to the default install. There should have been a mysql database added though (idk i stay away from one-click installs in general). Just go to drupal.org and download the files and install it to your account yourself.

What I am wondering though is why you are choosing drupal over WP. Would it not be simpler to just install an up-to-date version and then you can just export the information from the old blog and import it to the new. I say this because drupal is a very powerful content management system and if you have not used it before you will need to invest a lot of your time in customization. Were I you I would do a fresh install of WP for your live site and then make a development site using drupal and play with it until you are comfortable with it. This way your live site will be out there and you can make a switchover later.

#3

Thanks, Ryo-ohki. Yeah, the One-Click thing makes it so simple you can’t see what the heck is going on… I just nuked that install and will go ahead with the method of creating a sub-domain, MySQL database, and manual install of Drupal.

Good advice on the migration. Drupal is very much overkill, but I want to get up to speed on it and will play around with it on the staging site. (Glutton for punishment, I guess.)

I don’t care that much about the old blog content. Even so, WP is a much easier tool to work with. I’ve been using it on the blog for many years. In the end, I may use WP for the new site, too. It will be a relatively simple site.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer.

-pc