Our guide for moving a Zen Cart store to a new hosting company.

[jonnyboy22]

Hello,

We have had a customer ask us how he can move his ZenCart website over to us. With this in mind we have created a guide (using http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...fferent-server as inspiration) but included pictures and every step in as much detail as possible.

The Guide on how to move servers can be found at;
http://squirrelhosting.co.uk/hosting...info.php?id=44

We have also tried to make it so the guide can be followed no matter what hosting company you are moving to so everyone can use it.

Would any mods or experienced ZenCart users who have moved servers mind taking a look to see if they can spot anything we have missed? Since it includes every step in detail, it's quite a long guide but I think we managed to get everything in.

Thanks in advance and I hope the guide helps others in the future.

[stevesh]

I can't see anything you missed in this excellent, very comprehensive guide, but I think you're making folks work harder than they need to in steps 4 and 5. My installation method is in post #7 here: http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...Panel+zip+file, and I don't have to change any permissions, never have any file ownership issues, and don't have to bother with dist-configure.php at all. Could be my host's servers are configured differently from yours.

[jonnyboy22]

Hello Stevesh

Thank you for your feedback, its appreciated.

These steps may be unnecessary on some Hosting companies (including ours) but others may not CHMOD etc. Due to this we thought we would include them so that if anyone is on a server that doesn't do these steps automatically, they wouldn't get stuck on the 'System Inspection page'.

We understand where you are coming from on this one though.

[Website Rob]

You have a nice looking Tutorial but advising anyone to change their folder or file permissions to 777 is just wrong. As a Hoster you know that opens the door to hacking. I would advise people to upload the files and after setup only change permissions on the two config files; to 444.

Also, not widely known but on Linux servers at least, you can delete the two "dist-configure.php" as Zen Cart will automatically create the two required config files during install.

[jonnyboy22]

Hello Rob

Thank you for your feedback. We were debating whether to remove the 777 from the guide to force users to contact their host to get the correct setting. I know the Official ZenCart install guide states "directories to 777" but as you mentioned this could cause issues in the future. I think we will update the guide to remove the 777, suggest 644 for files and also advise that this step can be skipped unless they fail on the System Inspection page.

Thanks again

[DrByte]

In Step 5 you tell them to make the /images/dvds folder writable, but you didn't mention all the other folders that are also used by demo products.

I suggest leaving out the mention of the dvds folder if you're also leaving out all the other demo-specific folders too.
Maybe replace it with things like "attributes", "banners", "categories", "manufacturers", which are core whether demo products are installed or not.