Bulletproof Templates

It is good practice to do all your website development on your local PC, and then transfer/upload the amended files to the web server. Therefore it is important you take a copy of the live site and deploy it locally. This is simply a reversal of the tutorial Transferring your local site to the web server. Briefly, the steps necessary are:

1. Copy the database over if you have access to the physical database file. If not, you will need to export the data from the database on the server (using phpMyAdmin) and import it into a local copy of the database.
2. Copy over the web site files from the server to the local PC. These are the contents of the Joomla install folder. It is advised the contents of this folder be zipped before transferring. Extract the contents of the zip file into the folder for the local install of Joomla.
3. Amend the configuration.php file accordingly, changing the values (where necessary) for:
   • var $log_path
   • var $tmp_path
   • var $host
   • var $db
   • var $user
   • var $password

If the live site has SEO URLs turned on, you will need to rename the .htaccess file to something different (i.e. htaccess.txt)