You just need to log in to your cPanel, click on Backups and click on Generate/Download a Full Backup. You can choose a backup destination, for the purpose of this example, I’m just going to leave the default and save it to the Home Directory. You can save it to a remote FTP if you want, but that sometimes creates difficulties and I find it easiest to do everything as its own separate step. You fill out the email field with your email address as it’ll send you an email once it’s done (depending on the size of the site, it can take a long time). Then just hit Generate Backup.

Once you get the email letting you know it’s done, log in to that site in FTP and download the backup file (backup-12.30.2008_13-27-10_somesite.tar).

Now move to the new server where you will be hosting the site.

Note: don’t create an account for the site on the new server, the restore process will do that for you and if there’s an existing account with the same user name, it won’t work.

First you have to upload the cPanel move/restore .tar (backup-12.30.2008_13-27-10_somesite.tar) to the server, any existing site is fine.

Then you log in through SSH (this is how I do it, you may have another way) and move the file to the /home directory of the whole server.

After that, you log into WHM on that server.  Under Backup is Restore a Full Backup/cpmove file.  Click on that.  You should see the move/restore .tar listed in the box on the bottom.  It usually has the user name in the name of the .tar (in this case, somesite).  You put that user name in the Enter the username for the account you wish to restore: field and hit Restore.

It’ll process the file, create the account and get everything set up as it was on the old server.

First off, you should have a config file that’s being called from every page in your site.  This way you can define some variables that you’ll be able to access throughout your site.  This is pretty common and is in fact the case on the site I’m working on.

Your config file should look something like this:

<?php

?>

This covers the basics and allows you to do a lot of cool things with your site.  Anywhere you need to put the base url, you can just use $setts['siteurl'] instead and it makes your whole site portable.  And, as the point of this post, you can use $setts['db_name'] in place of the actual name anywhere you need to.  You can even go one more and name all your tables as variables here, so they can be changed in one spot and affect the whole site.

Ok, last part here.  How to use the variable in place of the name:

Take:

$query = mysql_query(“INSERT INTO database_name.tblName (first, second, third) VALUES
(‘First Value’,'Second Value’,'Third Value’)”) or die(mysql_error());

And instead use:

$query = mysql_query(“INSERT INTO ” . $setts['db_name'] . “.tblName (first, second, third) VALUES
(‘First Value’,'Second Value’,'Third Value’)”) or die(mysql_error());

It’s just simple concatenation.  You have to close the quotes with ” then use the . as the connector, put in your variable name and then another . to add the rest which needs to have the quotes started again.

Hope that helps someone

I’m also getting to play around with Flash and JavaScript a bit too.  I’ve put up a Flash gallery page that converts all the pictures so they look like polaroids thrown onto a table.  It’s pretty cool.  I’ve just got some dummy pictures in there now, but once we get some pics of her clients, we’ll put them in.  It’s got a bug in IE though where it only works the first time you visit.  If you refresh the page, or go to another page and come back, it doesn’t work.  Kinda pissing me off on that one.  I’d like to be able to make some changes to it though and I’m working on some ways to do that (of course I need to learn a bit more about Flash first).  I’ve also got a pretty cool flash gallery where I can show before and afters in a book-like format where you can actually flip pages.  It’s really cool, but that’s not live yet.

I also just today found a pretty cool mootools FAQ script, so I got to play with that a bit too.

I really like having this site to learn and play with, which will also (hopefully) be something we can turn profitable by driving business to Gina.