Done?
Published at 19:03 on 19 June 2021
I might (finally) be (almost) done with this blog upgrade. We shall see.
I will say that WordPress does not make it easy to move a blog to a new server. There is a defined processs for purportedly doing this. Pity it does not work very well:
- It has a rather silly 2 megabyte limit, one for which the recommended process does not remove. I eventually found a post from another user who had fought the same battle that explained how to do it, but wait, there’s more.
- The pathetic P.O.S. does not preserve permalinks! Congratulations, every internal link to another blog post is now broken.
- For some reason, it gratuitously replaces paragraph breaks with line breaks. WTF?
This is more than a little bit disappointing, because one would expect WordPress to be able to properly import from another site running the exact same software. I’m lucky, because I’m a computer geek. My solution was to go into the MySQL command prompt and do some database surgery:
- Make sure the two blogs are running the exact same version of WordPress.
- Drop all existing tables.
- Restore from a database dump taken on the old system.
- Go into the wp_options table and set siteurl and home to reflect the blog URL on the new host.
The average user, however, would be S.O.L. Most people don’t even know what SQL is, let alone know enough of both it and general database design principles to be able to engage in the sort of hackery I just did. They would be stuck not being able to move their blog, stuck with a broken, damaged new blog, or stuck with the lengthy and painful job of repairing their damaged new blog completely by hand.