What is the best way of duplicating an entire website?

I've built a complex site for a client, who wants this duplicated, and re-skinned, so it can be used for other means.

What is开发者_如何学运维 the best way of doing this? I'm concerned about copying every file as this means any bugs must be fixed twice, and any improvements must be implmented twice.

I'd look to refactor your code.

Move common functions into a library you can reference from both projects. As you mention that the new site is for a different purpose then you are likely to see divergence and you don't want to hamper yourself later, so extract the common parts and then modify copies (or if appropriate new files) of the remainder to complete your fork.

If you haven't applied good practice already then now is the time to do it and it'll make your work on both sites easier moving forward.

If all the functionality is the same and only the layout is different you could just create a new css file. 2 websites could have exactly the same code base but have different stylesheets and look completely different.

I think that using a version control system like subversion or preferably git, is a good way to duplicate your website. You will be able to track the changes that you make and revert to older versions if things do not work out.

You should implement some kind of instantiation, so look and feel, content and data will be shown depending of what instance of the application is accessed.

In other words, each application access to the code with a different application identifier, meaning content will be served depending on it.

Both application identifier will be pointing to different settings, so stylesheet and content will be absolutely isolated, and both domain will be living in the same IIS application.

If you want to duplicate a whole site it's probably best to copy the whole thing and amend as necessary. Obviously taking great care not to copy large portions of text or else you may be penalised by the search engines.

There are ways you could put the new site onto the same shared host (say within a subdirectory of the original site) and literally 'share' some files. If a unique change is required, you could instead reference a 'local' version of a particular file.

However that sounds like a recipe for a headache to me. I'd prefer to duplicate the whole site. It would be much easier to replace one or two functions on separate websites than it would to try and work out which website(s) are affected by a particular change to your source.