Its been a little more than a month since my last post. I have been a little busy with wooing (customers)and moving (a wordpress website from the test server to live). The website in question is a product related website and has a lot of images and cross-links in the main post and custom fields. At 250+pages, it was a big question about how to change all these urls to point to the new domain. While it is possible to update them through dabbling in PhpMyAdmin, I was queasy about doing it. Luckily two plugins came to rescue - Velvet Blues Update URLs and Search and Replace. I first used Update URLs plugin – it has a clean interface and less options. It did its work well, except that it skipped all custom field entries. Enter ‘Search and Replace’. I found it to contain more options and a little bit confusing (and I suspect a bit dangerous if you don’t know what not to check) but after checking the right boxes, it replaced nearly 400 entries in the custom fields flawlessly.

Another advantage of ‘Search and Replace’ is that you get to know exactly how many of each type of links are replaced, which is something ‘Update URLs’ lacks. I recommend this plugin with all my heart.

Happy moving!

But some introspection, some probing at the database with notepad++, and I’m back. Now I use WP-Hive to run 2 sites off the same WP install. Details in the next post.

But learnings from this event:

1. Always back up database AND install files.
2. When you intend to import a database in a re-install, only upload, do NOT install WP.

Cheers!

http://wphacks.com/how-to-move-wordpress-blog-new-domain-name/

http://yoast.com/move-wordpress-blog-domain-10-steps/

The most important thing to remember whatever you do is to backup the WordPress files AND the database!