How To Create A Joomla Demo Site
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Written by Russell Winter

Creating a Joomla! Demo Site is, in essence, very similar to a standard Joomla! installation  but with a few "non-standard" and little known variable changes you can also allow multiple users to login under the same account, whilst limiting what user details can be changed such as email and password.

  1. Install Joomla! as standard, selecting a sub-directory or sub-domain.
  2. Navigate to the "includes/" directory and modify the following lines in version.php
    - This can be achieved either online through SSH or FTP the file to your local PC, modify it there and re-upload it

    From:
       /** @var string Whether site is a production = 1 or demo site = 0 */
       var $SITE       = 1;
       /** @var string Whether site has restricted functionality mostly used for demo sites: 0 is default */
       var $RESTRICT   = 0;

    To:
       /** @var string Whether site is a production = 1 or demo site = 0 */
       var $SITE       =
    0;
       /** @var string Whether site has restricted functionality mostly used for demo sites: 0 is default */
       var $RESTRICT   =
    1;

    $SITE = 0
    Allows multiple user logins with only one account.  By default Joomla! allows only one active session per account as a security feature.

    $RESTRICT = 1
    Disables those logging in, both frontend and backend from changing user details - like password and username

  3. Confirm the site is working as expected
  4. Now modify your site to reflect your "Demo Site" requirements.
  5. Make all files and folders nonwriteable - especially the configuration.php file.

Thats the Joomla! aspect of the "Demo Site" complete, now you need to consider how to "Refresh" the content back to a default on a schedule, so as visitors test and play with the site, it will get cleaned up regularly.

  1. Download the scripts provided here ( http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,42048.0.html ) by Wizzie
  2. FTP to your server space (below the publically accessible area's, the script contains dB passwords!)
  3. Rename each script to what you want, removing the " .txt "
  4. chmod each file to 755
  5. Configure the required settings in both scripts (dBase's, usernames, passwords)
    - Read the comments, they describe what is needed.
  6. Run autoSiteDUMP.sh
    - This will backup your configured databases in to another directory. This only needs to be run once, or when ever you
  7. Setup a crontab to run autoSiteRESTORE.sh at a timeframe that suits you.

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