Move a WordPress blog to a new host

I’ve been moving The Groupings WordPress blog from one host to another. It’s surprisingly simple, but there were a couple of glitches.

The blog has about 70 posts, half a dozen users, and half a dozen links in the Blogroll.

Prepare the new server

First I set up the new server — it has a temporary URL at this time, as we’ll be moving the domain name shortly. I uploaded the most recent WordPress to the new server and changed a few options. I also uploaded my ‘standard set’ of plugins.

Export posts

Next I went to the old blog and clicked through to Manage > Export on the Dashboard. When you click the Download Export File button WordPress creates an XML file.

This caused my first problem: I have my system set for NetNewsWire to automatically add RSS feeds, so when I clicked the Download button in OmniWeb NetNewsWire leapt into action and tried to add a new feed. After having the same problem in Safari I tried Flock. Finally I was able to download the file.

Import posts

Then I went to Manage > Import on the Dashboard, and imported the file. That was easy. But I soon noticed that both the Links and the Users who hadn’t posted were missing.

Import links

There weren’t many Links but I didn’t want to do a whole lot of copy-pasting if I didn’t have to. And I didn’t: Import / export links explains what to do.

Import users

The Users …. Some had been imported (sort of) because they’d posted; others hadn’t posted and were just missing.

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I started up PHPMyAdmin for the old blog and exported the ‘users’ table into a file on my computer, opened the file into my text editor, removed the Users who already existed on the new blog, and checked I had no duplicate ID numbers. Then I opened PHPMyAdmin for the new blog and imported the Users.

Great! But I still had to copy-paste some missing information for the Users who’d posted.

Theme

Next I needed to sort out the theme. Unfortunately the theme had been updated since I installed and customised it on the old blog. I uploaded the updated theme to the new blog and spent some time adding in my previous customisations.

The BBEdit text editor is a gem for this: open two files that should be the same and choose Search > Compare Two Front Documents. BBEdit puts the two files side by side and in a window below lists all the lines that differ. Click a line in the listing to see the differences in the two files. Click an arrow in the Differences window to copy text from one file to the other.

This time I got a bit smart and created a custom.css to override style.css with my particular changes. Next time that particular part of an upgrade should be easier.

Plugins

On looking at my new blog, I realised I needed some more plugins that I had on the old blog. I moved them across and updated where necessary. I also had to modify some theme files and to customise the widget settings for the theme.

Now I just have to ask someone else to change the DNS servers, and wait till the domain name propagates.