I’ve been on vacation all week, and after returning from Florida on Wednesday, have spent my remaining time working on making the switch from the older version of DFE to the new one.
The first step in this exercise was to condense and enhance the webspace situation. Until recently, I’ve had three separate accounts with 1and1.com, each for a different domain. I did a bit of math recently and realized I’m screwing myself when I could as easily be using one account with WAY more space and features. But of course, all that means transitioning everything over from the old accounts to the new one, and that’s no easy feat.
Unfortunately, one of the major sticking points happens to be phpMyAdmin, which seems to have an undocumented cache limitation. Beyond a certain size, no .sql file will actually generate any kind of query. That makes restoring a database to a new database something of a pain, and in the case of the very large DFE database, neigh on impossible. Even to transition this relatively small web space required me to make XML files of the different blogs through WordPress’s Export function and then reimport them here. That worked quite well, actually.
But it doesn’t cover the wp_options table, which is a problem. My biggest concern is how my ability to upgrade to the new platform will be hindered by the sheer time required to do the project.
I’ve setup my server such that the old system will be housed on an /archive directory and the new one will be located in a /current directory. That way, if the doo-doo hits the fan, I can always bounce back to the old platform. Also, I can have the new platform working on a subdomain with its own database and leave all the old options unmolested. Still another benefit will be the ability to use mod_rewrite to bounce any requests for old pages on the non-WordPress side to the /archive directory, thus saving me the trouble of having to import all those old articles into the WPMU database.
This also saves me the trouble of having to figure out what plugins to load and where while my system is temporarily disabled. I’ll have the plugins where they need to be and I can throw the switch while they’re still in Dev.
The nice thing is: I installed my blog in the old schema under the subdirectory /blog, which means that the native setup for WordPress MU will put all my posts back into what I believe will be precisely the same permalink structure as what I’ve already been using. I’ve toyed with the idea of going live with the new platform but only using it for my own blog, however, this has been junked in favour of switching directories to make the cutover.
But there’s no getting around the fact that, if I want to transition the old platform to the new environment, I’m going to need to manually jerk around with a lot of SQL queries to make that happen. Again, I’d toyed with the idea of just switching to the new environment when I’m ready to go with the new platform, but that’s been nixed because there won’t be a way to switch back.
Wish me luck. This is going to get complicated. . .
