• The content that is packaged up includes any site images and documents
• The template includes a packager for skins and containers- my website uses a slightly different convention for the layout (see the Visto skin) that is completely destroyed when the content is moved into the standard page template layout that is used because the Visto skin is not present.  This the requires me to manually move every module- verrry tedious as my site has lots of pages
• If the correct skin is placed in portal/_default manually, then it should be referenced in the template file and used
• Third Party Modules (eg ones I have written) and content should be included in the template package

• The portal template is selected and read before the module selection page.  The module selection page would then be able to highlight the modules required by the template and drop all other modules unless the portal creator/admin running the installer selects additional modules
• Skins and containers required to accurately reproduce another site (ie my staging site) should be visible on the skins selection page.  Ideally, should include way to upload these skins/containers from the installer or at very least specify where they should go
• Ditto above point for optional modules (force PA only?)
• Ditto above point for site images and documents required to reproduce the staging/dev site

Would be useful if the installer could be run even on existing sites to upgrade a portal (not the DNN code itself)- thing of the Use Case of a developer or external agency developing and managing a client's website and which they'd need to deliver via email etc to their client.

I've gone down the template route for this dev/staging to live mogration because the old way I used (detach db, copy across to live, reattach dev/staging and new live Db) does not work in 4.5.1- site permissions are trashed.  Reattaching the dev/staging sit also has some pretty wierd behaviour- sometimes the portal installer runs and mostly the users (incl host+admin) are trashed.  Luckily, by hitting the DNN Db tables themselves you can grant access again but it's not a ful solution.

I reckon this is a pretty neat way to move sites particularly if the ALL content (images, docs etc), the required modules and the template could be bundled together for transfer between sites.

Any comments anyone?

I think Sebastian's response is appropriate in that the funcitons mentioned are for ease of management of a DNN instance, not for complete cloning of sites.  That said, I have given this a lot of thought and have a "working concept" in mind of how you could move a particular site with tons of pages, images and files to a new DNN instance.

Being a much less than average programmer (code hack really) I often find "easy" ways to use existing user friendly functions to accomplish my goals.  In this case what would be wrong with simply zipping up the entire folder structure of the instance, backing up the DB into a zip as well, then installing it to another server.

Now that I have all of the instance at it's new home, I could simply delete all other sites, rename the DB, Login to the DB, give it a new password, change the web.config strings to match, and wallah!, the site is moved.  Shouldn't take more than half an hour to an hour, but if the site is that big, and that important, should be worth it.

If I want to have a "clean" database to work with, I could simply create a new one and "import" the data from the old one, using SQL to reattach the Login User then do the above and again, I have the same end results with a new DB.

I may be wrong and haven't done a "real world" on this yet, but seems to me it should work.

Clay

Thanks Sebastian, guess I'm not quite as ignorant as I thought!  I have searched a bit for a way to do this, but found almost nothing. 

I have noticed that there are tons of little nuggets of "how to's" like this lying around, scattered all over the DNN landscape and have personally started collecting them.  Not sure what I will do with all of them once collected, but it's been a fun search looking for them.

Clay