This evening I made some significant changes to this website, many of which are hardly noticeable. (Das ist Gut!)
The Short Story
I migrated my site from sakeoftruth.com to joshualmann.com. I have also changed a few other things that made the whole migration work. Using 301 redirects, all the old links from within and without should work fine. Everything should look and function essentially the same, but a major migration like this often results in at least a few broken links. I have yet to find any, but if you do, please let me know. Thanks!
The Not-So-Short Story
For those interested in the nerdy details of the process, here’s what I did:
1. In preparation, I blocked google bot access to new domain with the following in my robots.txt file:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
2. I copied everything (basically) from my sakeoftruth root folder to the new one (i.e., wordpress files and databases).
3. I added the following to the wp-config.php file:
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://www.example.com');
define('WP_HOME', 'http://www.example.com');
4. I ran a search and replace script (available for download here) to automatically (and intelligently!) replace old urls with the new in migrated databases (and yes, I deleted the script after using it!).
5. I set a permanent (301) redirect from sakeoftruth links to the new ones.
6. I modifed the robots.txt file to allow google bot access to the new domain.
7. I let Google know of the domain change (via websmaster tools) and tweaked my feedburner info.
At this point, everything was working fine, but I wanted to make an additional change.
8. I changed the blog permalink structure to “example.com/post-title,” requiring 301 redirects from all the old links (“example.com/blah/blah/post-title”) to the new ones. Because Joost de Valk is awesome, I added a simple line to the htaccess file which automatically redirects all my old post links to the new ones (find it here).
In fact, this entire process is largely based on a 2008 tutorial Joost posted on migrating a wordpress site. I also found a bit of help here.
Update: I discovered that it was necessary to manually change the upload directory for media (via “settings,” then “media” in the wordpress backend) from the old to the new, an easy fix. Had not read this anywhere, but now it appears I can upload media as usual.