Good morning,

The company I work for has been using DotNetNuke to create websites for our clients. We have a test server that allows us to create the site locally, and let the customers examine the site before we deploy it to there server. We have been creating a template via the “Export Template” functionality in portals/host settings and then copying it to the customer’s server and recreating the site from the template. This process has a specific flaw in that if we have created fixed links on any page to another page in the site, they break for the tabid’s are not necessarily the same. I have 3 questions revolving around this;

1)      Is there a way to create a friendly link so that if a TabID changes that the links will still link to the right page?

2)      When restoring a template is there a way to force the TabID’s to stay the same?

3)      Is there a better way to backup and moves to a production environment?

Thanks in advance,

Raud

I got thinking about this - because I've found some issue with exporting templates and tabIDs.

I'm using the http://www.inventua.com friendly url - which doesn't use the tabid references at all and was very helpful for me when I had to rebuild my site from scratch because it didn't upgrad very well (Note to self - NEVER touch the core) Anyway - what I was thinking is that if you used this and put in the full url path - would that help.. eg.. home.aspx, about.aspx.

Or, as I am now thinking out loud, that might not work because if you put in full urls, you can't navigate between pages.

The other work around I've found is you can add these final elements to the site when it's done - and use the display all pages option or simply use the copy module from existing page option - and it will quickly populate your pages.

Obviously if you have alot of depth to your site it might not be so practical but I'm trying to come up with some workarounds, since it seems the issue of remembering the tabID's when exporting is not really working too well.

Nina Meiers