What is the proper way to deploy Orchard CMS to shared hosting?

Question

I've created a basic website using the Orchard CMS, and attempted to deploy it to my shared host, Softsys, using Web Matrix (via FTP). Currently, the site technically "works", however it looks like all styling has been removed (even from the dashboard).

Is there a step or files that I missed while deploying the site? I know "Web Deploy" is probably the preferred method of deploying, but I'm pretty new to this, and was not sure what the login specifics were, or how to obtain them for web deploy.

Here is a screenshot of what the site currently looks like deployed:

Edit: it turns out that the problem was on my host's side, for some reason the virtual directory was not being created properly - I still am curious what the proper/best practice method to deploying is however.

Answer 1

It looks like you have no theme applied. Check whether you have your theme existing in ~/Themes folder and properly enabled in the admin Dashboard. Maybe the /Themes folder content hasn't been copied?

UPDATE

If your hosting provider allows the option to deploy sites via WebDeploy - that would be the best one.

The easiest and most straightforward way to deploy Orchard site is to:

1. Have the ASP.NET application properly configured in IIS and accessible. If you use hosting - provider does that for you. If you'd have a dedicated server - you have to set up an application yourself.
2. Grab the deployment package from Codeplex, or build one from the sources.
3. Copy the whole package to your site's root (via FTP or WebDeploy).
4. Run it and proceed with the setup.

Basically - these are the same steps as for every "ordinary" ASP.NET application.

Answer 2

You probably need to set IIS user to have write access to some of the folders: Themes, Media and App_Data.