How to deploy a complete WordPress site to customer’s server

  • TJ

    (@tysonjm)


    15 years ago

    I’m a designer who designed a test site for a customer using WordPress and Thesis theme. The main reason for using WordPress is to make it easy for the customer to edit content. My big question is: How do I easily transfer the site as-is to the customer’s server? Big-picture speaking, I really need the least manual, fewest steps method for moving the site, since I’d like to make it possible for the customer to do this on their own (someone who knows very little about the web or how WordPress works).

    So, breaking the site components down, customer needs:

    1. WordPress install (can do from Cpanel)
    2. Database (pre-populated with content)
    3. Theme (Thesis theme/custom images via Developer license and .zip upload)
    4. Thesis theme settings/options
    5. Plugins

    I realize that the content (tables) from my test site needs to be imported somehow into the customer’s database — could that easily be automated for customer to do themselves without too many steps? This would be the same question for the theme options I’ve put in place and a couple plugins such as Contact Form 7.

    Thanks in advance for any ideas/solutions on how this process could be automated and/or bundled up easily for a customer–assuming a full-scale site transfer like this is possible WITHOUT having to repeat my original steps for theme settings and plugin installs! If a process could be put together for this, then I plan to deploy this and other demo sites out to other customers.

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  • I don’t understand something about your question.

    It sounds like you built your client’s site, and now you want to transfer everything to his server. But I’m not clear why you want that process to be very easy for the client. Isn’t that something you will be doing?

    That process really isn’t all that easy.

    I have found that the easiest way to do it — and these are instructions for a professional. They may need more detail to be useful, but right now, here is the outline.

    1. tar up your entire wordpress site directory – tar -cvzf mysite.tar.gz msysite/
    2. FTP it over to your host
    3. If you’re lucky and have shell access–here I am assuming you do–SSH to the remote site
    4. un-tar the zipped-up files: tar -xvzf mysite.tar.gz
    5. Using phpMyAdmin, export your copy of the database to a plain text file
    6. Using a good text editor, search and replace source.tld, with destdomain.tld.
    7. Also search and replace /source/path/to/files with /destination/path/to/files
    8. In the destination phpMyAdmin, back up the destination copy of the WordPress database, if there’s anything in there
    9. Import the text copy of the database that you have done the search-and-replaces on
    10. Edit the wp-config.php file to set the correct database settings for your destination MySQL setup–database, user, password, and host (that one does not usually need to change

    If you do all these things, your WP transfer should be nearly seamless and perfect. I do it this way now, because it preserves ALL my settings, all my plugins, all my configuration, everything.

    There are just a few cases where something has to be tweaked, that I have found. cforms doesn’t quite like it, so I have to back up the cforms forms and restore those separately. A few other things, but very close to seamless.

    I’m sorry if this wasn’t the right information, or too cursory.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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