Extensively redesigning site – need advice for best practices.

  • Resolved Kat Audette-Luebke

    (@kat-audette-luebke)


    10 years, 10 months ago

    I’m fairly new at this, please bear with me.

    Our nonprofit has an active site on voyageurs.org. I am trying to extensively redesign the site, using a new theme, and updating the navigation. We have a subdomain which I am using for this purpose: staging.voyageurs.org

    I would like to know if I am approaching this the right way. If I develop a great new look and feel for our site on the subdomain, how would I most easily then transfer this to the main site? I consider myself somewhat tech savvy but admit that I am really just learning how to work with WordPress.

    I know some basic tips, like entering links as /home/ instead of voyageurs.org/home so that they will still work once moved, but I really could use some advice on how to do this in the safest way and minimizing the downtime of our site.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • OK – So if you’ve got everything the way you want it on the subdomain – the best way to move it, in my opinion is the free WP DB Migrate plugin. you install the plugin, and when you’re ready to migrate, you can go to Tools -> Wp DB Migrate. Your old url should be already filled in ( the sub domain) enter your new URL (the main site URL) in the “New Address” Box.

    In my experience the value in the “New File Path” never matters, so I just copy the Previous File Path over to that field. Your mileage may vary, so you might want to figure out what this is on the remote server. Keep all the other defaults and hit export. It’ll download a database ready to upload on the site hosted at the main domain. This will find and replace all occurances of the old subdomain URL and replace them with the production URL, including both occurrences in db entries (post_content, post_titles, links, etc) and serialized strings (the way widget prefs are stored)

    In general, though, make sure you’re not hardcoding any subdomain links in templates, as this migrate script won’t help you there.

    Good luck, and feel free to ask questions!

    Bryan

    Thread Starter Kat Audette-Luebke

    (@kat-audette-luebke)

    Thank you SO much for this information, it is very helpful. I assume that you mean by “hardcoding any subdomain links” that I should be using the format:

    /wp-content/uploads/2012/10/VNPA-Final-Header-Logo.jpg

    instead of

    https://staging.voyageurs.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/VNPA-Final-Header-Logo.jpg

    If this is not what you refer to, please let me know.

    Yeah – specifically in the templates avoid hard coding absolute URLS – you’ve got the idea!

    Thread Starter Kat Audette-Luebke

    (@kat-audette-luebke)

    Perfect, thanks!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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