Migrating WordPress Categories To Another Domain
452 words | Last Updated: July 2, 2008 |
If you have been keeping a multi-topic blog using WordPress, you might one day decide to spin-off one of your categories into a separate web site (and domain name). Here are some tips on how you can make the transfer happen more smoothly.
1. Back-up your data. Before anything else, be sure to back up your WordPress tables, settings, and theme customizations. And just because you've backed something up means the back-up is valid.
You might get surprised.
So don't gleefully erase your existing data just because you (thought) you were able to correctly make a second copy.
2. Set-up WordPress in your new domain. Be sure to check the wp-config.php settings, though. Sometimes, your new WordPress database will begin with wp_abc123_ while your current blog uses wp_xyz789_
If you don't match the database prefixes, you'll end up with the dreaded: "WordPress Error: You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page."
3. Restore your data. Please check, though, if the blog post entries contain strange characters such as smart quotes, curly apostrophes, or even em dashes. That's what happens when people type out their blog post using MS Word (which uses SmartQuotes, Smart Ellipsis, SmartApostrophe, SmartDash), and then copy/pastes those text into WordPress.
If that's the case with your current blog, you will need to clean-up the data using a text editor (good old search-and-replace).
4. Redirect your old posts to the posts in the new site. Your current blog may be enjoying a bit of search engine juice, so if you want to pass on that benefit to your new site (when you migrate a couple of Categories), you will need to create 301 redirects.
One great tool to use is UrbanGiraffe.com's Redirection plugin. Please be prepared for some amount of manual work, particularly if your blog post titles in a given category look similar to the blog post titles in the other categories.
5. Hide your old posts. A useful tool here is the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, which allows you to easily hide the Category that you migrated from the usual list of categories shown in the homepage of your previous blog.
Whew!
What's the lesson here? Plan your blog and your categories. Try to see if a particular topic will grow significantly in the future and have a life of its own. Otherwise, be prepared to spend about six hours migrating and spinning-off your categories into their stand-alone domain sites.
(Okay, that's it for this technical post. You can expect more "business-related" posts in the coming weeks.)
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"Migrating WordPress Categories To Another Domain"
First Posted: July 2, 2008 | Filed in: Wordpress
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Hi,
I was hoping for a much more hands-on guide to migrating the blog from one domain to another considering all factors such as change of domain, absolute hosting path, change of database URL database login/pass etc. etc.
Basically, I am hoping that you will fill up the article with more meat.
Regards
Hi Rajib! This post focuses on migrating Categories. Perhaps in a future blog post, I'll write about migrating entire blogs. Thanks!
In the meantime, please try these:
thank you for thiis interesting tickeet, if only people understaand what you say
it s nice to visit thhis nteresting blog 