Move site from "catalog" to live

I have been testing my new ZenCart site and it seems that everything is working properly. Now I would like to make it live rather than /catalog. I'm not sure how to do this. Do I move the "catalog" files to the root? Maybe I'm making this too difficult and I just need to re-direct.

Can anyone give me some advice? I have read the posts and am confused on what to do.

Here is the site https://www.1stop-catgifts.com/catalog and I would like it to just be https://www.1stop-catgifts.com

Thanks in advance, Lara

One thing you can do is just create an index.php file in the main root of the site that quickly redirects the visitor to the /catalog folder. This way you don't have to move any files at all. I did this for a couple of clients because it was better organization for their site, especially when they have several other "areas" besides the store such as /blog and /forum...etc.

Here is some sample code to redirect:

Do I move the index.php file that is located in my /catalog? Or are you talking about creating another index.php file? Will this mess with the search engines? Or cause site to be slow? Thanks for your reply.....

catgifts:

Do I move the index.php file that is located in my /catalog? Or are you talking about creating another index.php file? Will this mess with the search engines? Or cause site to be slow? Thanks for your reply.....

I was referring to creating a brand new index.php file in the document root directory (the directory above /catalog). It should redirect instantly since it is a server-side php command and not something like a meta refresh tag.

I honestly am not sure how this would affect search engine optimization, because I am not an expert in that area. But my clients' SEO consultants have not made any comments about the location of the store files (so far at least). If this is something that concerns you, it might be best to plan to move them to the main directory so you don't have to worry about it.

If you want to move your files to the document root I think that is a perfectly fine idea too. Assuming you have enough space I would leave a copy of everything in the /catalog directory also, so that if the copies you move over to the root don't work right you still have a backup. You should be able to copy everything (all files and folders) under the /catalog/ folder to the location just above that. Then you should search all the files in the site for any specific path reference to /catalog/ so you can edit that out or replace it with the correct new path.

Good luck!

Thank you jacdesigner, the new php file works great. You Rock!

http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Server_Admin_-_Change_Folders

Gee, thank you, I love it when I rock! It looks like the instructions that Dr Byte pointed out from the wiki are very helpful also. I recommend taking a look at those if you would like a moving solution.

Cheers!

so this is the exact code? replacing catalog with the directory name I am using?

I did the install and I am working on the first steps of configuring in the admin panel.

Can someone offer some direction on where to go next with this? The above redirect will be useful once we are all setup, but not before templates get installed, ssl put up, etc etc.

Yes, that is the correct code to place into the index.php page. And yes, you would replace catalog/ with whatever your store directory name is (in my client's case, it was actually store/).

Of course, I do want to stress that this is a work around that worked well for my client, and it is not necessarily the end all solution. There is a wiki doc about moving your files to root if you want to do that.

Good luck.