Question

I’ve got a DotNetNuke system (v 5.6) that’s hosting several different portals, and I’d like to move one of them to another hosting provider. What’s the easiest way to do this?

Every web site I find that claims to explain how to move a DotNetNuke site essentially says “Copy the entire database over to the new system.” That’s great if you’ve only got one portal in the database, but I’ve got a dozen of them. I only want to move one portal, not all of them.

Exporting the site to a .template is another popular suggestion. This exports the structure of the site (all the tab definitions, for example), but it doesn’t include any of the actual HTML content. As such, that’s essentially worthless.

There must be a reasonable way to do this short of trying to strip one individual portals data out of every single DNN table. Right?

Answer 1

FYI, I did find a solution from someone over on the DotNetNuke forums.

Create a 2nd version of that install, then delete all the other
portals. Move the install with the one portal. We’ve done this several
times with installs with lots of portals and it works just fine. Yeah
there’s still some noise left in the db, but it’s a quick and
effective way of doing things.

Edit note that this will give you an install with 1 portal. You can’t detach a portal from one install and reattach it to an existing
install (well, you can, but basically you have to export the portal as
a template and that isn’t 100%)

This is the approach I took, and sure enough, it works.

In a nutshell:

1. Mirror the files for the web site to another server.
2. Mirror the DNN database to another server.
3. Log in a Host on the new setup and delete all the portals but the one you want to migrate.
4. Delete any module definitions that are not in use by the remaining portal.
5. Open up your favorite SQL tool and delete any entries in the Users and UserProfile tables that no longer have a matching row in the UserPortals table. DNN does not remove these by default, which is frustrating.
6. Hop in to Windows Explorer and delete all of the Portal folders you no longer need (ie: /Portal/1, /Portal/2, etc.)
7. Back up the database using Enterprise Manager to create a .bak file
8. Make a .zip of the entire DNN installation folder.

You now have a .bak that contains the database and a .zip that contains the files. Send those off to the new hosting company, and you should be all set. Just make sure to update your web.config to set the connection string properly to point to the new database server at the new hosting company.

It’s just that easy. 😉