The Joomla! Forum ™

i am new to Joomla! and I have been using Netobjects to build all my sites for years. I do like many features of Joomla! but I am wondering how to build a site without disturbing the present one. For example I have a non-profit website that is heavily visited and I want to change it to Joomla!. I was wondering if I can build it on one of our .net or .info domains and once I am satisfied on how it works transfer it to our .org domain? Or does anyone have another recommendation(s)? One other quick question is what might be a good extension to use to help automate creating a bloging community for our members? Currently we have to create a new folder in the root and install word press manually. We use for hosting Go Daddy if this is of any help to either question. Thank you in advance for any and all help!

Hey Emwilson, congrats on making the move to Joomla!

Firstly, you can upload a Joomla installation into a subfolder of your main website root using an FTP program like Filezilla. Once you've gone through your installation and everything is working well, you can access your website in that subfolder. So, for example, if your normal website had an address of www.website.com, and you created a folder using FTP called "newsite", you would access your Joomla installation at www.website.com/newsite (and access the administrator side of things at www.website.com/newsite/administrator).

Once you have gotten your Joomla site up to speed and ready to go, you would first backup your old site (and its database), download your entire "newsite" folder to your computer, clear out the old site content from your website root, and then upload the contents of the "newsite" folder back onto your root.

You could also keep your old site available by creating a subfolder called "oldsite" (or anything else that you wanted), and upload all of your old website files into this folder. You could then access your old site at www.website.com/oldsite.

Joomla is already equipped to display a blog. You simply need to create a blog category, create a menu item that links to this category with a blog display format, and save any new blog articles to this category.

You can add commenting ability to this with several different extensions. This one is a favorite: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions ... ents/12078

... but you can find lots of others by search for comments at http://extensions.joomla.org

_________________
Ryan
Numinous Productions
Custom Joomla Templates, Joomla Troubleshooting and Personalized Tutorials
http://www.numinousmedia.com

Thank you for the answers! I also think I found a company in which has membership based programs for the templates that we are interested in using with a fair amount of extensions too. Kind of trying to becoming use to subscription based service and supports on the templates. I feel this way it out weights all the extra work you have to do in netobjects. I am sure as time goes on I will have ample more questions and also the need for a programmer to create a few custom extensions.