What is the best way to copy a cloud installation?

[MapleOne]

OK so here is the question....

You have worked hard on a cloud installation, tweaked, perfected, got the addons, skin, settings exactly the way you like.

Now going for a brand new installation for another project but since there is no access to the file systems how can I copy the entire installation ie...

1. Theme (that is obvious)
2. All the addons with settings in place
3. All the forum settings

The ease of cloud is perfect but the task of launching additional communities is still daunting when you have a board already tweaked the way you like it.

Imagine if like in wordpress we could simply say COPY, pay for a second cloud install and then make the necessary changes to our new community.

Do you think that would increase cloud sales?

Well it most certainly would for me, to have my design and settings carry over would make the task far less daunting and I would probably already be running numerous cloud installations.

 

[Chris D]

It's definitely something we'll take on board as feedback but the challenge really isn't too dissimilar to what you would face as a self-hosted customer.

First and foremost: styles aren't an issue as you can export those already.

But for everything else, you simply have to make those changes again from scratch. Perhaps less of an issue if you've sufficiently documented everything.

With a self-hosted license it may be tempting to just export and import the entire database but then you have a lot of untangling to do with your settings vs existing content, or deciding which specific tables or files to copy across.

There may be technical solutions that could be developed in the future, but it might not be quite as simple as you might hope.