We are trying to duplicate a portal within our website by exporting the portal template and then creating a new portal based on that template. However, not all of the pages are being duplicated. In particular, the Admin pages are missing. It is a rather large site - 160 pages.

When we are creating the new portal, we do get an "Error on page" and we don't get any type of message saying that the portal was successfully created or anything like that.

Any ideas?

Which version of DotNetNuke is this?

Are you duplicating in the same installation, or in a different one?

It is DNN version 05.05.01 and yes, we are duplicating it in the same installation of DNN.

Does the portal get created? (It seems from you comments that it did)

Are the missing Admin pages the normal ones, or pages that you've added?

Can you log into the new portal (assuming it has been created) and view Host pages? Is it just Admin pages that are missing?

The portal does get created and the pages that are there have all of the correct content... but not all the pages are being created. We created the new portal yesterday around 4 and there are only 116 pages in the new portal (160 in the original).

The missing admin pages are the normal DNN Admin pages. But some of the pages that we created are missing as well.

We can see the host pages when logging into the new portal as Host Admin but not as Portal Admin.

And, I presume that the Host doesn't see that Admin pages either?

I wonder if this gets most of the way through the process and then dies, and dies before it creates the Admin pages.

As a test, try to create a portal using the default template. Does that create all of the Admin pages?

Assuming that is the case, you might want to look at the XML file and look at the nodes for each page to be created. Compare those to the pages that are created and see if there is a point at which the page creation process stopped. That might at least be a clue.

Also, you might want to run your template file through an XML "validator". That might help identify any errors, such as unclosed tags, etc. There's one here: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_validator.asp. If you find errors, you may be able to fix them by editing the XML file.


[I do recall that some versions of DotNetNuke had trouble creating portals from exported templates. I don't remember when this got fixed.}

No, Host can't see the Admin pages either.

I created a portal using the default website template and it was created just fine. After creating the portal, it took me right to the portal instead of displaying "Error on page" at the bottom of the screen. And the Admin pages are all created.

What xml file are you referring to? The template file or another xml file?

I ran the template file through that validator and no errors were found.

So do you think if we upgraded the site we might have more success with this?

Or... is there any manual way to duplicate a portal and all it's content?

Is this the same troublesome portal?

When you export a portal and include content, two files get produced: template and resources. The resources file is actually a zip file that contains files and other items needed to create the portal. Module content is stored in the template file along with all sorts of settings.

You could try exporting a template without settings and seeing if that one will create a portal successfully.

Given that you have exported the portal, you could try creating a fresh installation of 5.6.3 and seeing if you can use your exported template. After doing the install, though, you should first install modules in the 5.6.3 version to match the other version.

Hey Craig, Maybe you could help out with this. We have a portal that we're trying to duplicate and it keeps timing out it's over 100 pages and it has a ton of content. We've tried exporting it several times and had very different sizes on all the resource files (from 353MB - 545MB) all of which are unrestoreable due to the file being incomplete. Do you know of a site size limit for exporting DNN and if so, what alternative would you suggest.

You might want to take a look at the httpruntime section of your web.config. It's possible (I'm partly guessing here) that you may want to increase the value for executionTimeout which specifies the maximum number of seconds that a request is allowed to execute before being automatically shut down by ASP.NET.