How do I make new site go live?

Question

Hello, I hope somebody can help me out with this.
My client's site is hosted by and developed in Business Catalyst. They wanted changes and improvements made to the site and these were done on a new build that is now sitting ready to go in the Trial Sites section. What I would like to know is, what is the proceedure for turning off the existing site and replacing it with the new site? Is it a case of deleting the existing live (paid for) site and upgrading the new site to a paid plan? I feel that this isn't the correct thing to do.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Grant

Answer 1

Liam read the subject line of your forum thread and immediately formed his own conclusion.  He should have read more to understand your situation.
Unfortunately, one of the harder development workflows for BC is a redesign.  In order to test ecommerce and some other elements without impacting your original site requires that you create a new site, but there is no merging involved officially on BC's end.  What you'll really need to do is make sure everything is in working order and then copy your /Templates folder and any other folders you need in /Layouts or /_System to your local directory and re-upload those new assets (styles, images, layouts, templates) to your old website and then change the default template in the BC Admin area to your new template.
There is one other major obstacle, though.  If you used heavy BC modules and such in your redesign, each of those are unique to your new trial site.  If you are using content holder modules or showing specific catalogs in ecommerce in your markup, when you copy those pages/templates to your old site the ID's for the data will be for your trial site and won't work on the old one so before updating your templates on the enw site you'll need to replicate all your modules on the old site first by hand I guess and reinsert the module codes after you've uploaded new pages/templates.
I don't think there's an official way to merge just modules, catalogs, templates and pages into an old site, but your new trial site redesign is really just missing the CRM and Traffic data from your old site. IF you are a paid partner, open a support ticket and see if they can merge your old customer data and reporting to your new trial site.  That would be the easiest thing if they can even do that.