Currently we have a non-DNN production site named mycompany.com and a DNN development site named staging.mycompany.com.  I need to move this staging site to production to replace the  mycompany.com and still be able to keep some folders in the current production site intact. I thought about doing redirect to the staging site when users type in mycompany.com. But then the staging.mycompany.com url will be displayed in the browser.  This would look awkward…  In addition, I need to keep the current staging site for further development. What would be a solution for this?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Hi Sebastian,
Thank you for your quick response. From how I understand your advice combined with the help document, here is my plan. I would appreciate if you let me know whether I am on a right direction.

 For the transition to production, I will add an alias of mycompany.com to the current staging.mycompany.com site. Then copy the installation folder of this development site to a new site on the same machine, but has different ip.  Then make a copy of the current development database to support the new site and modify the connection string in the web.config of the new site to point to the new copy of the database.

 Do you think this would work and is there any possible issue that I should be aware of?

 Thank you for you help.

Again, thank you so much for the sound advices. I am successfully moving the code to production: the portals are up with new domain names.  However, currently the production and development sites still share the same database since I still have a problem exporting the development database to production database due to foreign key constrains on the tables.

I am using SQL 2005. Do you have a  any suggestion for a workaround for this problem? How would others export dnn database in SQL sever?

One more thing, can I delete the old alias that that points to development site in the production site?

Thank you