Moving a WordPress site

For whatever reason, or maybe I just don’t know the trick yet, but Plesk demands a real domain when creating a site. I had setup an online book catalog for our owner but after testing this out using  Joomla Media Library and everything seemed to work fine, well then it stopped. The errors I was getting indicated a SOAP error. This application relies on the Amazon Web Service. I thought it might be that Amazon had changed their methods for this.

Anyway it didn’t work and I wasn’t sure this was the best way to go with this so I suggest the owner try using WordPress. I felt it would handle the functions he needed and found an WordPress plugin to allow embedding Amazon info, called Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin and direct the user to Amazon where we are setup as an associate.

I setup up a site with an unused domain of the company so that they could populate their blog with the book data. Then it was time to change the URL pointer of this site to the new one.

In Plesk I deleted the old site and setup renamed the new site using the temporary domain name. You do that by drilling down to the domain’s property pages and in the Domain Adminstration group at the bottom left hand side is Domain Administrator Access.

In the Preferences section you can choose to rename the site. This also changes the folder name of the file on the server. So by changing the domain from originalDomain.com to newDomain.com the folder will change likewise.

I’ve done this on a number of WordPress installs already but this time the links kept refering back to the original blog.

I found this handy fix on the Codex of WordPress where you define these lines in your wp-config.php.

Note: Do not copy and paste this. I just spent some time troubleshooting the white screen of death because of the characters in this sample.

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’
http://example.com’);

Be sure to leave off any trailing slashes. (don’t use http://example.com/)

I had this on at first and when making updates in the admin the page would return leaving the domain off and triggering site not found error. (URL looked like this http://wp-admin/yaddayadda/)

Reconstructing WordPress After Calamity!

Boy Howdy! I’ve been having some fun here. My last post about changing the permission to allow an upgrade to 2.8.4 was the begining of the odyssey.  The automatic update indicated that it completed successfully however, when navigating to the site only blank pages would appear.

I tried looking into the wp-config.php and I could even pull up the readme.html from the update but no PHP pages. I tried renaming plugins and themes folders to see if i would work past this by avoiding a bug with the update.

The update did not overwrite any of the wp-content files so I had access to the themes, images and media from the original site.

I created another site with a spare domain in Plesk using the latest WordPress 2.8.4 and went through the process as though I was setting up a new WordPress install. I then took the database backup from the original site and imported that into the new site.

On this new site I was still only able to get blank pages. I had not moved my wp-content from the original site over to the new site yet. After doing this the site homepage would come up and the old site was replicated. However clicking on any link would lead to a blank page because I had not changed the setting of the new siter or turned off the old site from their domain pointers.

I suspened the original site pointed  the domain to the new sites IP and waiting for the change to propogate. After a couple hours I had restored my old site.

Warning: This is not for the faint of heart.

Update: I have run into this again updating 2.7 to 2.9 with the update function built into WordPress. Blank Pages the whole works. In doing a new reconstruction I had some problems with the data restore because of permissions and it would not allow me to create another instance of the database.