I have a site on a remote shared hosting server. I am testing the site in a subdomain like http://testing.mydomain.com. Everything works perfectly there. I also have files on my local machine. I uploaded the files from my local machine to my public_html directory so that that the site would be available from http://www.mydomain.com.

After uploading the files I confirmed that my _config.php is correct and tried to access the home page. No joy. There is no error, the page is just blank. I tried starting over with no success. I thought it may be because both the live version and the testing version are hitting the same database. I duplicated my database and now the live version hits dbRealData and I changed the test version so it hits dbTestData. The pages are still blank.

I think it has something to do with mod_rewrite. I changed my .htaccess rewrite rule from:

RewriteRule .* sapphire/main.php?url=%1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

to:

RewriteRule .* testing/sapphire/main.php?url=%1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

Now it displays pages, but all my URLs are similar to http://www.mydomain.com/**testing**/home/ or some variation of that. (** for emphasis only)

Even though I'm basically routing my pages through the testing configuration, when I make changes to the live domain, it's updating the live version of the database (dbRealData)

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could try to fix this?

[Sidebar: Does anyone know how long the forum search may be disabled? I think something like this may have been discussed before, but I can't find it]

The first thing I did was add the line to put the site in dev mode. Then I took testing/ out of my .htaccess file. The pages still came up blank.
I double checked both _config.php files and they are not pointing to the same database. The live site is pointing to the live DB and the testing site is pinting to the testing DB.

I tried setting the staging site into dev mode by changing its _config.php but that had no effect at first. I added testing/ back to my live .htaccess file so it started using my staging files again. Then I started seeing errors.

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://www.mydomain.com/home/?flush=1
Line Number 2, Column 1:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

I took this line out of the live Page.ss and still got the error. I took it out of the testing site Page.ss and the pages displayed as they had before, with /staging in the URLs. The interesting thing is that the line causing the error above was not on line 2, it is line 1 of the Page.ss file. There was no blank line before it either. I don't know if that matters.

At this point I know that it is definitely using the testing site pages to display, but it's reading the live _config.php and calling the live database. I don't understand why it doesn't just use the live files for the display. To double check this again, I changed the wording of something by directly editing the live database and I changed the testing site CSS to alter the display colors. I'm definitely getting testing site display with live data.

Is _config.php the only place that references which database it should use? Originally both sites were pointing to the live data. I changed the testing site to point to a testing db, but I only changed it in _config.php.

Check your php files. If they have blank lines after the final '?>', remove them.