Looking for Some WP Help

So after a couple of years of not being happy on my host and wanting to shut down the current domain I blog from (http://camplesegroup.com), I am working to make the leap. The plan is to move this blog to another domain I have on a different host, colecamplese.com. I toyed with switching platforms to MT, but at the end of the day I think WP is the better choice for my personal needs. I am however having a hell of a time making progress on moving forward.

Here are the dilemmas … any help/advice/guidance would be greatly appreciated:

  • My database is huge! Doing a raw SQL dump works every now and then, but the new host will not allow the DB that size … and to tell you the truth, I’d like to start over. When I go through the tables there is so much stuff in there that I am guessing causes some of my site’s performance issues. I’d prefer not to do the standard database export and inset on the other end.
  • The way I’d really like to do this is via the built in XML export. I like the idea of only dealing with the posts, comments, and assets in that way. I am able to sort of make that work, but not quite. When I do an export, I do not get all of my posts. It stops giving them to me from sometime back in August. It is driving me crazy — I have posted a couple of times to the WP forums at wordpress.org, but I haven’t gotten any help there. Does anyone know what the story is with the XML export and why it might be doing this? Anyone at all have any advice for me?

6 thoughts on “Looking for Some WP Help

  1. I’d reeeealy clean up that database as much as possible beforehand. There’s probably a backload of spam comments, which WP doesn’t really DO anything with so I have no idea why they are kept, as well as rss feed caching all over the place in the options table.

    That’s where I’d start.

    I’d also pick a different new host, sorry. :-/ Limiting your database size now means that they’d likely not be happy should you get more popular.

    As for the export only going partway through – the db cleanup might help, as well as upping php memory limits. which, you may even be able to do on shared.

    Although I do have to say on really large blog exports, things have a higher chance of getting messed up. Straight database to database is definitely safer.

  2. I’d most highly recommend the full database export (which you, ahem) should do as a regular habit (there is a nice Wp-backup plugin).

    You can likely reduce a good amount of file size, if you have access to a db amin tool like phpMyAdmin; on viewing your tables there is a menu at the bottom to “select tables with overhead” meaning tables with extra space, and then you select “optimize” – this reduces.

    I doubt if the database is any cause of performance issues, but if it has never been optimized, that may help.

    If you ever had SK2 installed, it generates a lot of stuff you may be able to kill.

    There are some ways around the large database file. It is just a text file with SQL commands that build and populate the tables, and, with some know how, you can segment it into a series of smaller files, and upload it in batches. I have done this before.

    The one thing to consider is if in your move, the URLs will change or not (will you maintain the same directory structure?)- If you change anything, you *can* do some global search and replace so you dont break old paths to images or posts; but it is better if you can keep the structure. I had to do this when I moved my first WP blog from Maricopa out to my own domain.

    I’d be glad to try and help.

    When looking at hosts, you definitely want one that provides a MySQL tool like phpMyAdmin.

  3. Thanks Jim! I ended up doing what I knew was the right thing to do — actually move the database. I had to do it table by table, each time doing find and replaces, to get it to work. Nice thing is that I cleaned a ton of garbage out in the process.

  4. You know, I thought about changing the permalink structure, but I am worried about all the internal linking I’ve done through the years. Does WP auto-resolve those things if I change it now?

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