gabediaz

Moving Your WordPress Install to a New Host

Background:
I finally took the plunge to upgrade this site to WP 2.8 after noticing that WordPress continued to not play nice with 1&1. Then again maybe I should say that 1&1 never played well with WordPress. I’ve covered some issues with 1&1 that included the scary 1&1 Error 500 issue as well as having to force enable PHP5 for 1&1 but once going to WP 2.8, a lot of things broke and it was due to the php.ini memory issue due to a cap by 1&1.

In looking for a new host, I decided to finally try HostGator as many people have had a great experience with them. In regards to WordPress, HostGator seems liked a good fit. 1&1 will allow a max of 20m of php memory to your php.ini while HostGator allows up to 64m of php memory, that’s a huge plus right there, throw in unlimited SQL databases and I was sold. Both 1&1 and HostGator offer larger php.ini memory options for dedicated servers but in this case we are dealing with shared servers. So let’s go ahead and outline the process of moving your database and WordPress install to a new host.

Getting Ready. Backup, Backup, Backup!
Since we are going to be moving a complete WordPress install along with the database we will essentially be creating a mirror copy of the install and database, the only significant change will be changes to your wp-config.php file since your site will have a new database name, user and password.

FTP to your current site and download all your site files and WordPress files to a site folder on your hard drive. If your WordPress install has a caching plugin, you may wish to deactivate it and not copy the cache files as there will be many.

Log into your WordPress installation and export all of your posts, pages, comments, customs fields, tags via the Tools>>>Export option, this will create a XML file of all your content, keep this in a safe place.

Next up may be the scary part for some people, you will need to access your database via phpMyAdmin. In here you will be able to export all of your WordPress tables.

If you have more than one database you may be presented with something similar in which you can choose between all of your databases. Here you want to make sure that you do not click export just yet, you want to open your WordPress database to be able to see all of the tables containing all your content. Click on your database name.

Once you click on your database name you will be presented with all of your WordPress tables, your may look different due to using a custom prefix or certain plugins utilizing your database but it will be similar to the one below. At this point you will be ready to export via the tab towards the top of the page.

You will now be at the export page, here you will be able to see all of the WordPress tables in the selection box that you will be exporting along some checkbox’s that need to be marked off.
In the SQL section
Check the following boxes:
‘Structure’
‘Add DROP TABLE’
‘Add AUTO_INCREMENT’ and
‘Enclose table and field names with backquotes’

In the data section check off the the “Data” selection box and the rest can be left blank.

Once you are ready, check off save and click go! Depending on the size of your database this may take some time to do a full export.

Importing Your Old Data to Your New Database
1.) Create a new WordPress install with a new database
2.) Log in to phpMyAdmin and select your new database
3.) Click on “Select All” to check off the boxes on all your tables
4.) There should be a dropdown option area, select “Drop or Drop Tables”
5.) Click “Yes” if it asks you if you are sure you wish to “Drop the Tables”
6.) With an empty database now navigate to “Import”
7.) Select your old database export file and import it into your new WordPress database
8.) Now that you have your post content in your new database it’s time to move all of your uploaded pics, themes, plugins over. Via FTP upload your files to your new server.

If there is any confusion please visit the WordPress Codex page on Backing Up Your Database

08. October 2009 by Gabe Diaz
Categories: Blog | Tags: Wordpress | Leave a comment

Custom Category, Page and Post Templates for WordPress

Quick overview of custom templates for WordPress Categories, Pages and Posts. You may already be familiar with Category and Page templates but custom Post templates are just as easy.

DISCLAIMER: Before making any edits to original files make sure to have backups in case something goes terribly wrong…not that it should but you can never be too safe!

WordPress Category Templates

WordPress Category templates are very easy to use, view the WordPress Codex – Category Templates and you will see that hierarchy for a category templates is:

• 1. category-6.php
• 2. category.php
• 3. archive.php
• 4. index.php

This basically just means that WordPress will first look for a template labeled category-6, if there is none, it will then look for category.php and so forth all the way down to index.php.

To create a custom category template, just copy your category.php and resave it as category+”your category ID number.” If you do not have a category.php, you can copy your archive.php or index.php but just remember that your custom template will look like the template you copied until you make your edits. So if you have a category.php, archive.php and index.php you will want to copy your category.php and work from there.

You can find your category ID number by logging into your WordPress backend…go to your categories section and hover over or copy any category names and you will see your category ID. Upload category-“ID#”.php to your theme directory and the specified category can now be freely styled to look differently than your other categories.

WordPress Page Templates

WordPress Page Templates may be easier than Category Templates. WordPress looks for templates in the following order:

• 1. The Page’s selected “Page Template”
• 2. page.php
• 3. index.php

Let’s pretend we want to create a specific template for an “About Us” page. Most themes will have a page.php so once again, you can copy your page.php and resave it, let’s call it about.php.

Once resaved, our page template must start with the following 5 lines of code so add the following to the very top:

<!--?php
/*
Template Name: About
*/
?-->

The above sets a name for your page template, so you can enter just about anything in the Template Name: “Your Choice” For the ease of consistency I would label the template name something similar to what I am saving the file, so this about.php will have a Template name of About. Now that you have your Page Template named along with some copied format from your original page.php you can edit this about.php to your hearts desire. Any edits made to about.php will only affect those pages using this template. Upload your new about.php to your theme directory and we are all set.

To use a Custom Page template just create or edit any page. You should see a dropdown box labeled Page Template, if all is in order you should see your template name as an option in the dropdown.

WordPress Post Templates

WordPress Post Templates are great because they allow you to make posts in different categories different from each other.

For example let’s say you had 2 categories named Apples and Oranges. You styled each category differently using Custom Category Templates but also wanted posts that appeared in Oranges to have a different look than posts appearing in Apples.

Custom Category Templates do not pass any styling to the posts within, posts take their styling from either single.php or index.php as per the WordPress Template Hierarchy.

Most themes will have a single.php, so yes once again duplicate your single.php…twice. We only need two Post Templates in this example since we want one Post Template for Oranges and we will just be using our original Post Template for posts appearing in the Category Apples as well as for the rest of our posts in our blog.

Let’s name one of our copies of single.php to singleOriginal.php, this is a direct duplicate of our original file, unedited.

For our second copy of single.php, which will be used as a Custom Post Template for all the posts in Category Oranges, let’s save this file as singleOranges.php. This file will be the edited single.php that will have whatever custom edits you want for all Posts in the Category Oranges. Make your edits to this file and you will also need to retrieve the category ID for the category Oranges, let’s pretend it has an ID of 10.

Recap

Before we move ahead, let’s make sure we have everything in order, we should have 3 files and 1 Category ID number.

The 3 files consist of a singleOrignial.php which is a direct duplicate of our original single.php. We should also have a singleOranges.php which has our edits for our custom look for all posts in the Category Oranges (ID #10). And finally we should still have our original single.php unedited in it’s original format.

Now let’s edit single.php since WordPress first goes to single.php for all Post Templates. Edit your single.php with the following:

    <!--?php
    $post = $wp_query--->post;
    if ( in_category('10') ) {include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/singleOranges.php');}
    else {include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/singleOriginal.php');
    }
    ?&gt;

That’s it! Basically the above checks the posts to see if it’s category 10, if so use the template singleOranges.php, else use singleOriginal.php. What if you wanted a Custom Post Template for Oranges, Apples and Grapes but still wanted a single.php for everything else?

    <!--?php
    $post = $wp_query--->post;
    if ( in_category('10') ) {include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/singleOranges.php');}
    elseif ( in_category('11') ) {include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/singleApples.php');}
    elseif ( in_category('12') ) {include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/singleGrapes.php');}
    else {include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/singleOriginal.php');
    }
    ?&gt;

A very easy way to customize posts in any category. Go ahead and get creative with customizing then come back and leave a comment to show it off, would love to see what some people do!

13. June 2009 by Gabe Diaz
Categories: Blog | Tags: Wordpress | 80 comments