With that being the case, I needed to work out how to easily migrate a number of WordPress blogs across to a new server and thought it was worth sharing the experience here for others in the same situation as I seem to have got it just about right after two or three migrations.

So here is my step by step guide – hope it’s helpful for others in the same situation:

1. Get the new version of wordpress setup first – I would suggest using a temporary domain / sub-domain for this (test.domain.com or something like this). If you have Cpanel included in your hosting then WordPress is a 1 click install which makes life even easier.
2. Login to both the new and old wordpress admin sections – check what plugins you have activated and install them onto the new version of wordpress – this step is important as if you’re using Viper Quicktags for YouTube videos and import your posts BEFORE you add the plugins then they won’t work.
3. Replicate the settings of your plugins (google analytics, seo for wordpress, etc) and your permalinks.
4. Next go to Tools > Export and export all your posts and comments to a file on your old version of wordpress.. if it’s not the latest version it may not be under tools but you should find it easy enough.
5. Next go back into the new version of wordpress, select Tools > Import.  It’s a fairly simple step by step process and make sure you assign the posts to the correct user account / create one as part of this process if required.
6. All your posts and comments should be setup now – the only thing left to sort out should be the theme so let’s do that next.  First, you’ll need to FTP into your old host and go to the wp-content > themes folder and download the theme that you have been using to your local drive.
7. Next FTP into the new site and put the theme back in the same location on the new server (in the wp-content folder).  Go into the new version of the wordpress admin, select Appearance and you should be able to select your theme.
8. If you’ve previously setup Widgets for your theme you’ll need to add these all in again – you can go into your old version of WordPress and make sure you put them all back into the same order again here.
9. Now the new version of WordPress is an exact copy – the only thing left to change is under Settings.  As this is on a temporary domain you’ll need to change your WordPress Address (URL) and Blog Address (URL) to the correct URL’s.  You’ll be logged out and send to the old version of your wordpress when you click on the save button.
10. Last step – change your DNS settings (you’re host or register will either give you a control panel to do this yourself or do it for you) so that you point your domain to the new server… This typically can take up to  12-24 hours to propagate across the internet but is usually a fair bit faster than that for most DNS servers.

That’s the lot – I’ve managed to get it down to a fine art and can do it in around 10 minutes now without any problems and the main things to look out for are getting the plugins activated at the right step and getting all the settings and widgets included… Using this method is a hell of a lot easier than exporting tables from an SQL database as others have suggested in the past!

I thought it would be a nice idea to write a quick post about some of the new features and include a few screenshots.  I have to say, I’m quite excited about the full released so let’s go straight into what’s new.

As you will see above, the Dashboard has undergone a few changes and is, in my opinion, much improved.  Highlighted in red is “Quickpress”, which allows you to write a post straight from the Dashboard homepage.  There is also an Inbox and whilst this feature is not working yet, it seems to be a mix of trackbacks, comments, announcements and potentially even a way of contacting other wordpress site owners.

Above you will see the new “Install plugin” feature – I know that this can be done via a few plugins already, but it’s awsome to have it straight out of the box and linking in to the WordPress Extend site – every install I’ve tried so far has worked but I think they need to improve the search tool slightly as I had a few problems finding what I was after.. so much easier than booting up an FTP client!

I was a little disappointed with the speed of the admin interface until I saw this beauty.. Makes the speed in uploading tons faster than in version 2.6.

The media library is a fairly new feature and this is now under “content” – it seems to allow commenting on actual images/videos/files but i’ve not played with this feature too much yet.

A few things have changed in writing a post itself – there is a new settings field that allows you to change some of the display options in the post and you can also make posts “sticky” to appear at the top of your blog, useful for people who use WordPress as a CMS or for large updates / intro text.  You can now also move the “widgets” around in the write post page, though I’m not sure why you’d really want to do this.

Comment threading (and reply to comments) will be installed as default and you can read about all the other planned changes on the wordpress site.

It’s looking good – whilst I wouldn’t recommend installing it on a live site I’ll probably keep it going on here and update it every week or so to look out for new changes.

One of the big things that I wanted to be able to do when building a site is create a review site – none of the plugins that I previously looked at handled this very well so I ended up installing Drupal as it was more powerful for this.

However, a new (paid) plugin has recently been released called WPReviewSite.

It’s currently just under $100 (so about £55) and includes both the plugin and theme to get a review site running pretty quickly out of the box.

Here are some of the features listed on their website:

• Adds Star Ratings To Your Comment Forms
• Sorts Your Posts by Weighted Average
• Integrates With WordPress Administration
• Powers a Whole Website or Just What Parts You Want
• Doesn’t Modify WordPress Database Tables

I’ve given it a quick go and it seems very powerful, although the proof is in the pudding and I’m aiming to get a full site using this within the next week or two and will publish the URL when it’s all up and running so you can give it a test drive

More information about the plugin and theme on their site

Tonight I finally managed to sit down for an hour or so and upgrade – I’m using version 2.7 of wordpress which is still in beta so I’m sure there will still be a few bugs but it’s better than what I had.

I’ve also upgraded the theme – I’m not sure if I’m going to keep this one but it’ll do for now – comments appreciated.