Welcome back to the DotNetNuke tips! I started doing this over a year ago, though with getting married last fall and working on my Datsun 240Z lately I haven't blogged near as much lately about DNN topics. So here we go, starting up again with my DotNetNuke Tips.

Today's tip follows:

When you're doing testing locally with a backup for a Production Database and Website one of the things you need to be sure to do is change your Portal Alias for your local URL, instead of your production URL. If you don't do this you'll hit the local URL and it will most likely redirect you to the production URL. This can cause a bit of chaos if you don't notice that you're no longer on the local/testing URL and start modifying the production web site.

To change your portal alias you can do the following.

Open your SQL Server management tool; SQL Enterprise Manager, SQL Server Management Studio, or whatever you choose to use.

Browse to your local/test database, open up the PortalAlias table. You can either Modify your existing Alias, or you can add a new Alias to this table. test.myurl.com for example, be sure to setup the proper portal ID if you're adding a new alias and you have a lot of different aliases in there. You might also need to setup the aliases for the child portals as well if you plan on using those.

The next step is crucial. You'll want to reset your website before you try to hit the new alias. You can do that in a couple of ways, I always prefer to open up the web.config file, add a carriage return and hit save. This will cause IIS to reload the site, clearing out the cache and loading the new portal aliases.

Look for more DotNetNuke tips coming soon!