Moving a Robohelp website

[Guest]

Hello, I have been given the job of moving our robohelp website from one server to another.... I fiddled around with it and have gotten most things working, 2 major problems are:

1. The buttons across the top of the website (Home, Search, Contents) are still pointing to the old IP address. I cant find anywhere to change these


2. The home page has somehow changed from the default, to some random help page within the document. It was originally written using Robohelp X5, I upgraded to version 7, not too sure if the conversion cause this....

The default home page is normally the index down the side, and a search option in the middle of the page with company logo.....

IIS is set to point to default.htm .. and if i open up this page on the server, it too shows the random help page.....



I am a complete novice HTML and Robohelp..... which could explain a bit!!!!

Thanks in advance.
Dekkar

[Peter Grainge]

Is RoboServer involved here? Is the output from RoboHelp created as WebHelp Pro or WebHelp?

Looking to see which is currently set up as the default should help.

1] A standard set of buttons points to stuff within the output so there is no consideration of where it resides. These buttons sound more like one the author has added using absolute paths.

2] The default topic is hard coded into the build of the output so I cannot see how that could become random. If that default topic had not been moved to the new server, I would expect a Page Not Found error. Default.htm sounds like the name of the default topic whereas you should be opening the help with the start page. That is defined in the first page of the wizard that creates the output.

I am wondering why you are moving the help in this way rather than just configuring RH to publish to the new server. Especially as moving it seems to have screwed up so many things.

[Guest]

Hi, thx for the reply...... The reason for the move is that the original author put the website on a Citrix server in a remote location to our main office (not too sure why) But the server is being retired and not replaced.... He was administering it there, and it all worked, so it wasnt really a problem.

He has since left, and we have realised that he has been using robohelp locally on his machine, and then manually copying the website to the citrix server (using windows explorer) when updates are needed...

So for some reason his version of Robohelp wasnt publishing it properly..... He was quite website savvy, so he had a much better idea on it that the rest of us.....

They gave me the task of centralising the website on a dedicated virtual server, in our main office.

In the long run, I will just change the DNS entry to point to the new server rather than the citrix server, but for testing I am just using the IP address as the website.


As for you other questions, I havent installed any robohelp server anywhere... Just a copy of Robohelp7 on a desktop machine, and then publishing it to the server.

And as for the default.htm... you are right.... it isnt default.htm, it is as you say....

Finally the buttons.... Im not too sure how they are coded, I expected them to just move with the website, like everything else, but maybe I have to change DNS to point to the new server and just see how it goes..... Here is an image of the button, maybe they willl give you more of an idea:

Robo


I hope this sheds a little light on my situation......

[Guest]

Hi..... I am slowly working my way thought these probs.... and I think I have them sorted.... Except now for one final major thing that!!

The home page is now showing up.... It only consists of a logo and a search box......

The problem is there is no search box showing up when I move the website.... The background to where the search box shows up.... but there is nothing in it!

hmmmmmm the original website was created using x5...... Would it be possible that something happened when converting this to version 7 of Robohelp?


Thanks,
Dekkar

[MergeThis]

First of all, "moving the website" should not be necessary as long as you have all source project files available, and manually updating files is not good practice.

Simply create a new WebHelp Single Source Layout and point to the new server location (layout properties, first page, first field). To update the server with only the changed files in the future, deselect the "Republish All" option. Note that files in the whdata, whgdata, and whxdata folders also get changed and added as topics get changed/added/deleted. (Also note that you should generate output to your local machine, then publish [multiples] anywhere, local or server.)

As to the old location, you can simply delete it when you have the new one up and running.


Good luck,
Leon

[Guest]

Hi..... Thanks for the replies guys.... much appreciated..... I feel I'm getting to know this product a bit more....

I will give you suggestions a go and see what happens.!

As for screen shots... here are a few:

Working

Not Working

Thanks,
Dekkar

[Peter Grainge]

Apologies for not responding sooner, 9 hours of meetings yesterday and meanwhile someone decided to "up"grade our internet access and managed to block access to many legitimate sites. Fortunately we can still access the porn! :-)

Leon is right that you should not be moving this stuff but republishing. I suspect however that your predecessor has implemented a non standard search. Can you publish some screenshots to some site so that we can see what you get when you click Search, plus some of the other issues.

[Peter Grainge]

Yup, that is a non standard search. If you look on my site there is an article on ZoomSearch and you will see the search results come up in the topic pane, rather than the pane on the left.

Your challenge is to find out how that works. Good luck!

[Guest]

cool..... thx for the help...!

will see if we can work out whats going on with that search box..