What should I upload to the 'live' site?

This is my first time, so please be gentle!

I have a new site on my development box at home, which is currently identical to the live hosted site. When I have made changes via the admin menus on the development box, I'm not sure which files I should upload to the live site to carry these changes across.

I don't want to make the changes directly to the live site via the admin log-in, as I don't want customers to see work-in-progress.

I'd prefer not to upload the whole site each time, as the configure.php files are different on the live and development sites, to reflect the different paths on the two computers.

I think I can now mostly answer my own query, but if I'm wrong or anyone can add anything useful to it, please continue this thread!

I need to export the development database, upload it to the live server, then import it. I'm using PHP MyAdmin for the export / import. Export is straightforward, though I'm not clear about import - I assume it's done via the 'SQL' tab in PHP MyAdmin, browsing to the uploaded file and then clicking 'Go'.

Do I need to 'drop' the tables from the live database before doing this import or will they be overwritten by the more recent imported data?

earthdoctor:

I think I can now mostly answer my own query, but if I'm wrong or anyone can add anything useful to it, please continue this thread!

I need to export the development database, upload it to the live server, then import it. I'm using PHP MyAdmin for the export / import. Export is straightforward, though I'm not clear about import - I assume it's done via the 'SQL' tab in PHP MyAdmin, browsing to the uploaded file and then clicking 'Go'.

Do I need to 'drop' the tables from the live database before doing this import or will they be overwritten by the more recent imported data?

yes, your going to need to drop those tables from your live database and put an export of your other database into it. otherwise it will just tell you that the data is already there, unless there are new customers/order and such.

you are correct on how to import the data. if your db sql file gets too big, you may want to command line it to the database. depending on weather you timeout or not while importing. (this is only for larger databases)

Perhaps this reference may help too:
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Server_Admin_-_Switch_Servers

Thanks for the help - the Wiki link put it very clearly.