How I went about moving and updating my ‘trapped’ Wordpress site

As the volunteer web-editor for a local non-profit, I decided to replace our old-style SHTML site with a new Wordpress CMS-based site. I didn't want to replace the current/live site, however, until I had a complete replacement (and the approval of the management). So I created the new Wordpress site as a temporary sub-site of our existing site. Unfortunately, because of the provider, Aplus.net’s, stupid install script the new site was ‘trapped’ – I could neither update the Wordpress software nor could I reconfigure any plugins. The primary reason for this was that Aplus.net had set it up as a (partly) shared install, i.e., some of the system files were in a shared read-only folder somewhere (not in my personal folders).

In order to remedy this I had to do the following:

• make a backup of the new Wordpress sub-site
• create a new properly-working copy in the new location
• merge the two copies into a proper replacement site
• confirm that I could update and configure everything properly

There were lots of instructions online about how to go about moving a Wordpress site but none seemed to apply to my situation -- un-trapping a script-created site!

MY FIRST UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT

I initially tried installing an up-to-date copy of Wordpress as a new install, and confirmed that it worked properly by installing all the same plugins and theme as before. I also restored the ‘wp-content’ files from my original site. I then used the Tools > Import function to restore the “WXR” (.XML) file I’d exported from the original site. Unfortunately, this only restored the Pages but none of the theme or widget settings. As a last attempt I dumped the new site's MySQL database and restored it from a tweaked copy of the original DB (where I’d done a search-and-replace for all the URLs). For whatever reason this caused the whole setup to reset to defaults. Fail.

HOW I SUCCEEDED

1. Deleted all the files in the new location and started over.
2. Copied all the install files from a matched version of WordPress (v3.0.1 downloaded from their Release Archive).
   
3. Manually updated only the wp-config.php.
   
4. Copied all the files from the old site. I had to rename the script-created folder, 'wordpress-content', to match the standard folder-name, 'wp-content'
   
5. Used the phpMyAdmin technique to download the SQL DB from the initial site in uncompressed text format.
   
6. Manually fixed all the URL and folder references using search-and-replace:
   kobsd.org/wp >> kobsd.com
   kobsd.org >> kobsd.com
   wp/wordpress-content >> wp-content
   wordpress-content >> wp-content
7. Went into phpMyAdmin on the new site, dumped all the tables and restored the edited SQL file.
   
8. Finally, I tested the Wordpress auto-update as well as installing/configuring new plugins, and it all works properly!

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