Copying WP between folders on my site.

  • I’m getting to grips with WordPress, and looking to set up a good way to test things before I do them in anger. Now I know WP is pretty good when it comes to previews and similar, but that is not what I have in mind. What I am thinking of is to have several installs in different stages, so I’d have a live one, (at the top level of my site), and a test one – this would be periodically synched with the live on, then I would try changes on the test one. If this looked good and worked well, I would then want to copy the test one on top of the live one. And I figure probably also smart to have a ‘research’ install for really mucking about. The test and research installs would be in unlisted folders deeper in my site, where people are unlikely to find them.

    Now it seems to me that all this could be easily accomplished with a plugin, (or other tool), which did a copy between locations, (while making any necessary changes to links and references so it worked in the new location).

    Is there a ‘one click’ type solution for this please?

    Cheers, Nick

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hi Nick,

    I can’t think of a quick way to achieve what you need. What you could do is have your main site at abc.com and possibly have a development subdomain, say dev.abc.com – of even have it in a sub folder.

    Just take copies of your files and database. Place the files in the subdomain, then change your wp-config to connect to the duplicate database.

    Then when you’re happy with the development site copy it over your abc.com content.

    Does that sound like an ideal solution? I can probably churn out some more detailed instructions if that helps.

    Thread Starter nick.peckham

    (@nickpeckham)

    Thanks Kayleigh.

    I thought that just copying files did not work – or is it OK because everything is at root level?

    One other thing occurs to me – is it possible for an outsider to work out what subdomains I have set up? If so someone could find my test install…

    Thanks for your help,
    Nick

    What you need to do is go in to the admin dashboard and go in to ‘settings’ > ‘General’

    Here you can set the URL to be the new location, THEN move the files to that new location.

    That will allow you login to wp-admin at the new URL but you may need to run a URL updater plugin (Velvet Blues) which can update all the URLs for you after the migration because it’s likely some will not work without doing so.

    Do take a backup before attempting to move anything of course!

    Outsiders can likely find your subdomain. If this bothers you you can either set up a .htpasswd which prompts people for a password before being able to see your subdomain; but this can be annoying. Otherwise I would advise just ticking the box in settings which disables bots from crawling your test subdomain.

    Hope this helps!

    Thread Starter nick.peckham

    (@nickpeckham)

    Thanks for the info, I’ll take a look at all that.

    Cool! Let me know if you need any further help!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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