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Bill Kamm wkamm-at-rvyriptide.org |nyphp mambo list 022005| wrote:

>I'm new to Joomla and have what I think is a basic question, but I can't 
>find a good answer anywhere.  I have an existing web site, at 
>mydomain.com.  My homepage is mydomain.com/index.php.  Now I want to 
>install Joomla, and take my time learning it while my existing web site 
>stays in place.  So I install Joomla into a subdirectory, and I can 
>access it at mydomain.com/joomla/index.php, without anybody else knowing 
>about it.  That's fine until my Joomla site is ready to go live.  I 
>don't want users to have to go to mydomain.com/joomla, so how can I get 
>my Joomla site to show up when visitors go to mydomain.com?  Do I use 
>.htaccess?  (I don't want the 'joomla' address appearing in the 
>browser's address field if I can help it.)  Do I copy everything from 
>the Joomla directory up to my document root?  Any other suggestions?  
>Thanks,
>
>Bill
>  
>
I'm sure the Joomla experts will chime, but in the mean time I can offer 
some basic tips.

It should be trivial to migrate from a Joomla install in a subdir to 
have it as your default site. You can either put a redirect in yourself 
or via .htaccess with RewriteBase or Joomla can take care of it through 
the base directory definition.  But you should consider that subdir name 
carefully, since it may be "permanently" reflected in your sites URLs.

So in the future your joomla site can be made accessible at 
www.whatever.tld but deeper content might look like 
www.whatever.tld/joomla/article.html

Therefore choose your dirname carefully. If you site is about widgets 
you might install joomla into a widgets folder so future URLs are like 
www.whatever.tld/widgets/article.html

Of course there are re-write add ons that allow you to rewrite your URLs 
just about however you want, so using those you can eliminate that extra 
subdir from your urls. That's your choice. There is some benefit to 
keepin gthe URLs shallow, and some benefit to keping important thematic 
keywords in your URL.

If you are planning to do your development on that live server (in a 
"secret"subdir), you should take some steps to keep it unknown until you 
are ready to launch it. Add the joomla directory to your robotx.txt with 
an exclusion, to keep the legitimate search engines from publicising 
your content in their results pages. be sure explicitly list your https 
content as well  if you have it SSL access enabled. You may also want to 
install Deny from all/Allow from your IP via Apache to actually keep 
them from indexing your content, and to keep the poorly-behaved bots 
from accessing (more and more of an issue these days).

Personally if you have access to your Apache/shared hosting I would 
setup a separate domain for the trial, install at root level, and 
develop such that you can easily migrate it to another domain name 
instead of doing it on your existing domain.

-=john andrews
http://www.seo-fun.com