No doubt WordPress is the easiest and powerful web software available for making a blog. It’s powers are enhanced day by day with the introduction of many new plugins. Today WordPress is not only used for blogging but also for portals, job boards, membership sites, online stores and much more.
So its pretty natural that many people have used WordPress for making there blogs or portals. WordPress as a CMS has developed a lot. It now has lot more features and options as compared to its older versions and its time we take advantage of these features. There is one such work/feature that I would like to discuss today.
I was presented with a nice and big financial portal powered by WordPress. The site was almost a year and a half old With 10 posts added each day. It contained lots of categories, tags, images, plugins and what not. I was to redevelop it. A new theme, new features overall would make it more polished. It was to have features like job board, a forum, ads integration and memberships. It all seemed much nicer to me. Make a local installation of WordPress on my Mac using MAMP, add theme, plugins and get the data. But things started getting ugly. Here is the full story.
I downloaded MAMP and installed in on my Mac so that I can get to run WordPress easily. Once MAMP was installed and running, I downloaded WordPress 3.0 and installed it. It was very easy to install WordPress. Once the setup was done I changed few options in the WordPress setting menu. Do Remember while redevloping a site, u need to copy the same permalink structure as that of the existing site/blog. This helps in keeping your search engine visitors. At this point I also logged into my PHPmyAdmin and exported the WordPress database. This is not required, but I always do it so incase things go wrong I can just delete and import the database instead of installing WordPress again.
Then the theme was added and minor changes were made to suit the portal needs. Plugins where added for funtionalities like job board, security, videos, spam protecion, forum, memberships, etc. Once all this was done the last part left was importing the data from the live site to my local wordpress blog. The reason I wanted to get the data was because I needed to set category menus in the theme and also test the full site before it went live. Now there are few methods that can be used to export the data one WordPress installtion to another. One can use the WordPress export/import feature or one can also direcly export / import the MySQL database. I was more comfortable with the WordPress export / import option.
I exported the wordpress XML file using the export feature from the live blog. The size was 49MB. So while importing I had to change my PHP limits on my local machine. Also while importing the XML file there is an option called “Download and Import file attachments”. I checked this option as almost all of the post contained images which were taken from the live site while importing. This made the importing a long task. Importing over 7000 entries does take time. So instead I found an easy solution. I Googled and found out that there is a program called WXRspliter to split the XML file into small parts which can be easily imported. Thanks to Ranger Pretzel for making such a lovely program. I splitted my XML file into 10 parts and then imported them one by one and the importing went smoothly. All the posts, tags, images, categories were imported perfectly.
Now the site is fully ready on my local machine for testing.
