[wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

[mickey panayiotakis]

Relative URLs are great until they don't work: the RSS issue is significant.
 Also, if I enter something on the editor (including an absolute URL), I
expect (nearly) exactly that to go in the database. I never rely on systems
to always only use relative URLs.  When I migrate, it means
search-and-replace in the database.  Some of these are easier than others.
 Moving from "dev.domain.com" to "www.domain.com" seems the easiest.  Then
again the domain is often somehow listed in the directory structure, and
that may not change right away. In theory there shouldn't be any filesystem
structure in the database, but that's theory.  There's moving from
dev.domain.com/wordpress to www.domain.com. And somewhere in the process
client decided domain should be different, so it's moving from
dev.domain.com/wordpress to www.newdomain.com.

And moving websites does take a bit of time to do it right, pretty  much on
any CMS I've worked with.  The time-consuming part is not moving the CMS:
the problem is migrating all the content, which invariably contains absolute
URLs.  the searchreplacedb script (and being handy with your editor of
choice) helps a bit.  But any database changes are non-trivial, if only
because they are dangerous.  I think of it as disarming a bomb.  Sure,
clipping the blue wire takes about as much time as executing the
search-and-replace. But getting there requires planning.

So what's my process?  I backup twice, think for a long time, and
search-and-replace in the database.  If I started the site and there are no
complications, I keep it simple: from dev.domain.com to www.domain.com is a
much simpler operation.  As I said, I never assume that there are no
absolute URLs, regardless of CMS.

mickey


-- 

Mickey Panayiotakis
Managing Partner
800.270.5170 x512
 <http://www.infamia.com>