At my old webhost (GoDaddy) I was still running my blog on Wordpress 2.3 and I wanted to upgrade to 2.5 when I transferred the blog. So I started with installing WP 2.5 on the new server and thought that I could just import the PHP tables. Boy was I wrong, I ran into errors all over the place, I think because the tables were set up a little differently in the two versions. I also ran into a problem with the permalinks not working correctly which I fixed with the .htaccess file, but by then it was too late. About 8 hours into the process I found this Moving Wordpress tutorial in the Wordpress Codex. Due to my frustration with dinking around for 8 hours, this really irritated me; why didn’t I look for this sooner?

So, it was back to square one. First of all, I deleted everything I installed originally except for the database, which I emptied the entire contents of. Then I FTP’ed everything from the GoDaddy server onto my own computer in the same file structure that existed. Once that was done and the nameservers were changed over, I was able to FTP all of the same existing files onto the new webhost. This took care of two problems, installing wordpress and keeping the same custom settings.

So, with the file transfer complete I was then able to go to the PHPMyAdmin at GoDaddy and export the entire contents of my database. A simple copy and paste into Notepad with a SaveAs .sql file and the export was done. Then I logged into PHPMyAdmin of the new server and imported the database. Down On Our Luck and One Million Pet Pics were still running on SQL 4.0 or 4.1 so upon importing, I made sure to choose the SQL40 format. I don’t know if this was necessary, but I did it anyways. Everything imported great and here we are. I did need to update the database the first time I tried to access the admin section, but with a click of the mouse, this step was complete.

Even though this took longer than I wanted it to, it was a great learning experience. PHP tables have kind of been mysterious to me up until going through this process, but I am now starting to understand them which will come in real handy for future projects. I also learned that when in doubt with Wordpress (or not), check the Codex and I should save myself quite a bit of time.

Since I got a little long winded here, next time I’ll tell you about the upgrade to 2.5 and how my future upgrades will be a lot easier with a plug-in that I found for upgrading Wordpress.