Can I change the portal number on my site?

Overview

DNN allows individual portals (aka sites) to be created, each of which can have its own suite of domains and aliases. The first portal created has PortalID 0, followed by PortalID 1, etc. There may come a time when you need to rearrange the portals on your site. For example, you may have a mismatch between your production and development environment after retiring a site and want to realign the two environments.

In general, this process should not be done in a production environment unless absolutely necessary. The PortalID a site uses does not affect site performance or user experience. PortalIDs are primarily used in back-end transactions invisible to the end-user.

However, if you do need to shift the contents of a site to a new PortalID, you'll be using the Import/Export tool.

Solution

As with any process that works comprehensively with so much of your site's contents, we strongly advise you back up everything including your database and all site files before starting. Perform the operation in a staging environment first to ensure no problems arise.

The solution will broadly have three steps:

1. Export the site from the origin PortalID
2. Import into the target PortalID
3. Disable or delete the old origin site

Before you start: Identify the origin and target sites

You will want to start off knowing what sites will be your origin and target site. The origin is the site to be moved, and the target will be the site we'll overwrite. The target site will be the site occupying the PortalID (called Site ID in the UI) that you'd like the origin site to reside on. You can see the list of your current sites by going to Mange > Sites:

Note that importing is a destructive process. If you don't want your target site's content lost, you will need to export a copy of your target site as well as your origin site, and may ultimately need to import it somewhere after you've moved the first site.

Step 1: Export your origin site

Follow the instructions in the article Exporting an Individual Site to export the origin site. If necessary, export the target site as well if you want to preserve the contents for a later import elsewhere.

Step 2: Import into the target site

Follow the instructions in the article Importing a Site to import the files you exported in step 1. Make sure you're importing into the target site and using the files from the origin site.

Step 3: Cleanup

The contents of the origin site should now be on both the target and origin PortalID. The origin PortalID information will ultimately need to be either removed or copied over with an import from a different site. If you know that site will not need to be used, you may wish to delete the site.

Testing

Testing will involve browsing the newly-copied site and performing as many site actions as are practical. It can be helpful to catalog the core functions used by most visitors of your site and perform as many of those functions as practical. File manifests and database entries should also be cross-compared and spot-checked.