Migration Completed

Posted: April 27, 2015 | | Categories: Content Management Systems

Back in December, I set about migrating this site to a new hosting provider. Hackers had been having some fun with my site and I was having trouble blocking their efforts. Online advice said to whack the site and start over, so that's what I tried to do.

I setup a new hosting account then backed up my existing site. Next I tried to restore the existing CMS data into a new CMS installation (of the same CMS software, of course). The plan was to eliminate any old or nefarious application files and basically start from scratch by doing a new CMS installation with old data. Once everything was working, I planned on upgrading everything to the latest version of the CMS software.

I didn't spend a lot of time on this (over the last 5 months), but I did take a few vacation days to work on this. The result was that I failed miserably, I simply wasn't able to restore my CMS files into a new CMS installation. The biggest issue I faced is that when I brought up the new site, it 'worked' but when I tried to add my plugins back to the CMS, the legacy installations were still there and it became quite a mess.

I tried to manually whack the old plugin installation data (the new CMS didn't actually have the plugins anymore, but the database entries were still there) but that didn't work. The CMS wasn't capable of supporting what I was trying to do.

Sigh.

So, anyway, what I did was backup the site then restored it into the new hosting account. Everything worked (yippee). Next, I upgraded the CMS and almost everything worked. I poked around a bit and fixed the most glaring issues (for me) and completed the migration this evening.

The contact form isn't working right now – I had CAPTCHA problems with it on the old hosting account and now I just need to remember what I did to fix it. I'll work on it this week and will hopefully have things back up and running again. If you need to contact me, my email address is my first name and this site's domain.

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Header image: Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash.