How to Change the Domain Name for your phpFox Website

Written by Stephanie Brown Friday, 26 October 2012

This article will focus on how to change the domain name associated with your phpFox website.

There may be a time when you realize that the current domain you are using for your phpFox website just isn’t the right one for the site anymore.  There are many reasons for this, you may have started out on a .net and now have the .com, or the content that you and your members are posting just doesn’t match well with the old domain.

As always, before making any changes to your phpFox website, I suggest you make a full backup of all files and the database.

The first thing you will need to do is log into your phpFox account at http://www.phpfox.com/account/

On your dashboard, select the arrow to the left of the license you are editing, and select Edit.

The following screen is where you will edit the domain name for your site.  Replace the current website url with the new domain, then select Submit.

After you have changed your domain at the phpFox website, it is time to change the domain in your server.sett.php file.  Login to your filemanager in cPanel or via FTP.  Navigate to include/settings/ and edit server.sett.php.

Look for the following lines and edit them with your new domain and installation folder (if you do not have phpFox installed in the root of your site):

$_CONF['core.host'] = ‘yoursite.com’;
$_CONF['core.folder'] = ‘/’;

If the information for your database connection has changed, you will need to modify this in the server.sett.php file as well.  The most likely fields in this case that you would have to edit are as follows:

$_CONF['db']['host'] = ‘localhost’;
$_CONF['db']['user'] = ‘db_username’;
$_CONF['db']['pass'] = ‘dbpass123′;
$_CONF['db']['name'] = ‘db_name’;

If you enabled short urls and had your domain in a subfolder of your site, you will need to edit the RewriteBase in the .htaccess file.

After you have made all the necessary changes for your site, you will need to clear the cache via the filemanager or via FTP.  Remember to clear all files from the file/cache folder EXCEPT index.html.

Congratulations!  You should now be able to change your domain for your phpFox website!

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