Hi Tina,

There are many ways to handle this, my answer is one, that I have found the simplest, easiest to implement.

My preferred way requires that you create a subdomain. It could be called anything, but let's call it "drupal" so the domain would be: drupal.example.com. In cpanel, and probably others, when you create the subdomain, a subdirectory will automatically get created at example.com/drupal. The Drupal files go in the drupal subdirectory. But you navigate there via http://drupal.example.com and NOT example.com/drupal.

When you are ready to take the site live, back up the old site's files and then remove them, and then simply move all the files and directories in example.com/drupal to example.com/ (make sure the .htaccess file gets moved with everything else).

With this approach, there is no need to fuss with the settings.php file or with the .htaccess file or any other trickery.

Look at the following two examples for how you write paths for links internal to the site. Let's say you have an "about" page, and you've created a custom URL for it "about". During the development process it's url is:

http://drupal.example.com/about

For Drupal config screens that ask for a "path" like the menu set-up screens, the path you will give is:

about

(NOT "/about" and NOT "http://drupal.example.com/about")

If you are creating a link to the about page "inline," meaning that you are writing text in the "body" field or some other field and creating the link "by hand" -- then you want use a "root relative" link as follows: <a href="/about">Visit the about page</a>. Note that you WANT the leading "/" in this case.

Hope this is clear!

best,

Shai

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Tina Williams tina@words-etcetera.comwrote:

I am new to Drupal, and I'm setting it up for a 1000 member organization's website. Drupal will run their website as well as using CiviCMS (thanks for the recommendation!) for our membership needs.

Because they have a current website, and I can't take it off-line while I develop the Drupal one, I've set Drupal up in a folder. Now I'm beginning to worry about how hard it will be to move all this to the root directory??? Am I worried about nothing?

How difficult is it to move from the folder to the root and how many things can go wrong?

Am I asking a really stupid question?

Thanks,

Tina

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