Change URL only on WordPress+CiviCRM

Question

We have been setting up a WordPress + CiviCRM installation on a test subdomain, let's call that wewantthis.testdomain.org.

I also have a domain name wewantthis.org that I wish to simply point to the exact same installation directory as wewantthis.testdomain.org, but with (hopefully minor) changes to settings and the database as we are not changing servers or even file locations on the server.

Note that I can do this easily for Wordpress only by

1. using phpMyAdmin to modify the wp_options table's "siteurl" and "home" rows to point to wewantthis.org;
2. fire up WP/wp-admin and run a Wordpress plug-in "Velvet Blues Update URLs";
3. under WP > Settings, change the Site Address and WordPress Address to wewantthis.org. That is all there is to it. Btw, for reasons I don't want to go into, I'm not interested in a redirect solution.

Is there something similar I can do for the CiviCRM database and settings? I've read some Q/A's regarding both moving the server and changing URL, but they seem to suggest a completely new install of CiviCRM and starting over, but at least making use of the previous database, whose creation was the bulk of the work.

Any advice would be appreciated as we have a test configuration that we want to go live by simply changing DNS pointers from the existing wewantthis.org (no CiviCRM) to our new one that will have CiviCRM fully integrated.

Thanks to the experts out there. This is our first CiviCRM setup.

Answer 1

The advice in the documention is fairly old and much of it is no longer appropriate. In the most recent CiviCRM versions, more and more of the url settings are automatically calculated from the 'base url' and are relatively easy to update just by editing the CIVICRM_UF_BASEURL in your civicrm.settings.php file, and then clearing your caches for good measure. In fact, most of the time you don't even have to worry about that, you can access much of your civicrm from multiple domains (e.g. with and without www). Of course, that's not usually a good idea, and the one key time that the settings file matters is when your civicrm is invoked via a non-CMS entry point (e.g. the click-through tracking url from CiviMail).

Usually, it's when you also have to change file locations that it gets the most icky.

The one recent gotcha I've seen is a ckeditor security check for file uploads that will break things in a small way if you don't have the file locations right (e.g. you need the actual file path instead of a symlinked one). But that's a digression for completeness and unrelated to your question....