Playin’ with WordPress

My standard volunteer niche is to be on the technology committee for the organization. Something about 35 years in IT is hard to run away from 😉 . Anyway, I’m on the tech committee for the Emerald Isle Parrothead Club. For several months, we’ve been in the process of visioning a new website that was easy to use, supported distributed editing, and lots of folks know how to use it…hmmm…sounds like WordPress! I’d previously set up a prototype site on my personal ISP space, and everybody was happy with the look and feel.  I didn’t do much but set up the shell, and others on the committee added content and structure, but I was the one in the sysadmin role. The time came to move it to its new home, and an additional complication was that the club domains were on GoDaddy, not 1and1, the ISP I’ve used for years, so I had to learn to speak GoDaddy.

We switched from a domain-only account that had pointed elsewhere to a Linux hosting account, and with that came a new “free” domain. So, I decided that we needed to do things right and have a test/validation site and a prod site, using the new domain for “test.” I use Updraftplus for backups so I transferred the backups over to the new site. I first created a new virgin site, installed the Updraftplus plugin, and then restored the backup. I knew I needed to patch some things in the wp_options table, so I did that first with PHPMyAdmin, but I wanted to do a better job, so I Googled up a really nifty tool, Search Replace DB which had some great features (like an audit mode) so I gave it a whirl. It found quite a few places to fix, albeit most in areas that would have never been a problem like spam comments. Got the prime site working, though I knew I still needed to move it again before finishing, as I’d intentionally put it in an experimental location. I then cloned the database for my validation site, patched the URL’s, copied the directory, and set up the validation site. Then moved the production site again to its final location, patched the database again, fixed the DNS entries, and all was well.

Fun stuff!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *