If you’re a Rochen customer or regular reader of this blog, then you’re well aware of the exclusive to Rochen cPanel plugin, Joomla Utilities, which makes installing and managing Joomla an absolute breeze. In the last 12 months we’ve brought you features such as one-click installations, security tweaks, file and directory permission fixes, super administrator password resets and even mass management of multiple installations for Rochen resellers. The features work for all Joomla 1.5, 1.7, and future releases. We work continually on these features to make Joomla management through your Joomla hosting as easy as possible for you.
Creating your staging site with our new Clone tool
Our newest addition to the Rochen-exclusive tools set is the ability to create your own Joomla staging site within a separate directory or subdomain of your hosting account. This feature is possible with our brand new Joomla Utilities Clone tool.
Designers and developers of Joomla websites know that sometimes it’s necessary to be able to test out a new extension or template, or do some custom development and/or trouble shooting, without causing interruption or possible error to a live installation. It can be tedious to copy a site over to new directory manually, as you have to edit your configuration files all over again, import a copy of your database, and possibly adjust various links on your staging site.
With the clone tool you no longer have to worry about using your valuable time to do all of that. We’ve created this new feature so that all you need to do is go in to your Joomla Utilities option in cPanel’s CMS Utilities and just select the installation that you wish to clone, and then enter the directory or sub domain where you want to clone it to. It takes your entire installation including all data, extensions and template files, as well as the database, and duplicates it all in to your chosen directory, leaving your live site untouched and open for business. So easy!
From there, you can begin working on your staging site. Add any new extensions or templates you’ve been wanting to try, fix up any old or nagging issues in the code, and run as many tests as you need to. All without interrupting your live Joomla website in any way!
For a preview, we’ve prepared one of our quick demo videos below:
In other Joomla Utilities news, you’ll now notice that the handy cPanel plugin has a new look!
Our own in-house developer, Thomas, has taken some of the excess information and layout out and trimmed the Joomla Utilities interface to blend it in better with the standard cPanel look and feel. As well, he has created a more efficient user experience as you can now quickly select your desired function from a list, as well as hide the instructional information if you don’t need to read it every time. Check out the new look below:
A New Look For Joomla Utilities
Thanks for your time! To learn about the other Joomla Utilities features and watch more demo videos, head over to our Joomla Utilities page.
-Wendy
Wendy Robinson joined the Rochen team in June 2010 as a sales support staff member. She is also currently involved with the Joomla! project as a member of the Community Leadership Team.
Tags: Backup Joomla, hosting, Joomla, Joomla Extensions, Joomla Hosting, joomla site migration, Joomla Utilities, moving your joomla site
This will come in handy when Joomla 2.5 version comes out and I want to test.
Question: How to do I take my “staged” site, to take the place of my live site?
So cool – Looking forward to using this!!!!!!
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for checking out our blog!
You could clone your staged site back over to where your live site sits. However, the important thing to remember when cloning a live site to a staging area is that you are taking a copy of the site at that exact moment in time.
So, if you later replace your live site with a clone of the staging site, it’s going to override everything in your live site directory. This means that any additional content (posts, images, forum threads, etc) that have been added to the live site while you worked on the staging site, will no longer be there.
Thanks Wendy for the reminder about new content added to your site while your staging site is worked on.
I enjoy the blog posts and Joomla utilities!