Recently, Positively Glorious! had a major failure and I eventually migrated everything from one blog to a WordPressµ installation. This allows me to host multiple blogs on one installation and save the time of maintaining the 11 blogs I was previously pulling my hair out over.

Later, a friend read about my experience and thought about doing the same thing and I told her I’d get details to her, and then I quickly forgot. I wish I had, because I now have to migrate Radio Tierra’s site so I can host it here as well, and I don’t remember what I did.

Thus, like a good little geek, I’ll write step-by-step directions so that when I have to do it again, I’ll have documentation. Have fun Morgan.

Preparatory Stuff

0. Install everything. You have WordPressµ installed already, right? Because this is a post about migrating, not installing, right? Okay.

1. Create the subdomain. Do this first. If your host allows wildcard domains, that’s the easiest way, but I’m using Bluehost and they don’t. Despite the FUD, Wordpressµ works perfectly fine without wildcard subdomains. I just have to make sure that whenever I create a new blog, I need to first create the subdomain.

2. Create the new blog. I’m assuming you’ll be using subdomains, so let’s call the new subdomain kzas.jmetta.com for kicks. If you’re not using subdomains, your mileage may vary.

e. Get the blog id. Easiest way to do this is go to Site Admin->Blogs and look. The blogs in your WordPressµ installation will be listed by number, that number is the blog ID.

3. Copy wp-content. You’ll want to store everything that your old blog held, just in case you forget something, so grab a tarball of that entire directory. You don’t need to grab a tarball of wp-admin and wp-includes because you didn’t hack core, right? RIGHT?¹.

π. Plugins. Install any that you had on the other blog, remembering that some plugins just plain don’t work with WPMU. Also, go ahead and install Donncha’s awesome Domain Mapping Plugin. Go ahead, it’s worth it. There’s plenty of juice on using that plugin on Andrea’s WPMU tutorials site.

4. Copy the files/folders in the wp-content/uploads directory of your old blog and place them in wp-content/blogs.dir/${ID}/files at your new blogs home, where ${ID} is your new blogs ID grabbed in step e.

5. Copy your theme from your tarball or old site into wp-content/themes of your new site (of course, now’s a good time to rethink that faded ol’ theme).

Coda

At this point, you’ve pretty much set up everything so that you have all of the information from the old blog, and are ready to use that information to build up the new blog. For that, we’re going to use the database directly and copy the old blog’s database to manually build the new blog. That’s all a topic for the next post.

1. I did, that kind of screwed me up a bit