dave-smith.co.uk

(written ages ago, but never posted)

So after a lot of doing nothing I’ve finally moved my site, nothing wrong with the old hosting company I’ve been using for the last 10 years, just that the level of complexity they offer is no longer needed by me and I’ve been using Rackspace Cloud Sites now for a year for other bits and pieces and so with a large number of bounced emails due to an IP address being blocked it was time to change.

Simples…..
1) Grab the DB from the old server, do some DNS jiggery pokery and then on to a new site build.
2) Into the Rackspace control panel
2.1) add a new domain
2.2) build a MySQL DB (add a user)
2.3) create an email address

We’re now ready for the site build.

I downloaded the latest version of WordPress, uploaded the DB and ran the WP installer, filled in all 4 fields and job done, my site was back, but on new hosting. I decided to grab the plugin’s I wanted and as ever I’m still tinkering with the theme to use.

Oh and I found some useful Word Press tweaks to get the built in updating feature to work.

I added the following to my .htaccess to go above the mod_rewrite stuff

php_value post_max_size 128M
php_value upload_max_filesize 128M
php_value memory_limit 128M
php_value max_execution_time 6000000


Less than an hour to migrate the site including the DNS changes and email setup, happy days.

So quickly found a new theme which is fairly customisable, need to track down some nice header images now and maybe play with the colouring… progress (sort of)

did no one tell me the old theme was dark (obvious) stylish (well to me) but totally unusable…

Theme hunting begins again, back to a default one for now.

Found the theme I had just moved to under drupal, just need to update it to support widgets (and from taking a quick look at the code a whole load of other changes – which I’ll never get around to doing), once I get the chance I’ll quickly post up the process I went through for migrating from Drupal, someone, somewhere might find it useful. – Thanks John.

Of course I’ve just realised that one of the themes I quite like is desk-mess which looks a bit familiar.