Well, everyone, after far too long a time, we’ve got the Monkfish Abbey site up: http://www.monkfish-abbey.org. Rachelle’s blog has moved as well. You can find it at http://www.monkfish-abbey.org/blog.

You’ll probably have noticed the name change from “notes from a truth seeker” to “urban abbess”, as well as the redesign. The wax stamp is by Mike LaJoie, created from a monkfish drawn by Rebecca Dallin. The overall design is a home-grown affair, with a banner graphic taken at our last Fourth of July party.

I have Apache redirects up, so all links to the old blog site should seamlessly take you to the new site. RSS feeds should also automatically redirect as well. If not, you can find the link to the feed of your choice in the sidebar to the left.

For those of you interested, here’s some technical details on the transition. In addition to moving from one domain to another, we also upgraded from Wordpress 1.5 to WordPress 2.02.

Step-by-Step for Moving and Upgrading a WordPress Blog

1. Install WordPress on the new site. Our site is hosted by DreamHost, and they make this simple.
2. Backup the old site files. SmartFTP is a great FTP client.
3. Backup the MySQL database from the old site, but don’t check the “Drop Table” option. For some reason doing so prevented me from later uploading the database. It could be that we were also moving from MySQL v4 to v5. But, if you manually drop the tables you don’t need this anyway.
4. Extract the .SQL file from the GZIP archive. WinZip is great, as is Windows XP’s native archive integration.
5. Search & Replace all the URLs in the .SQL file to use the new site. EmEditor is an awesome, light-weight code editor. Make sure you do this correctly! I spent 4 hours last Saturday trying to get a test migration to work, only to realize that my search included the final forward slash ( / ) and my replace did not!
6. Use phpMyAdmin (included with DreamHost) to drop all the tables from the new database for the new site.
7. Use phpMyAdmin to upload the database tables.
8. Make sure the values in the wp_options table for siteurl and home are set to the new domain name and address. You can use phpMyAdmin to edit the rows.
9. Upload all of the old site files to the new site.
10. Make a local copy of the wp-config.php file from the old site & update it to point to the new database, username, password
11. Upload the edited wp-config.php to the new site
12. Connect to the site to make sure it is working.
13. Go to the Options | Permalinks tab and re-save the Permalink options to ensure the site’s permalinks remain the same
14. Turn off all plug-ins and log off.
15. Delete all the WordPress 1.5 files from the new site, leaving the .htaccess, wp-config, and any theme & plugin files.
16. Upgrade to WordPress 2.02, including uploading the new WordPress files.
17. On the old site, set the .htaccess to permanently redirect the old blog to the new blog. In our case, this entailed adding the following line to the .htaccess in the root directory of the blog site:
    Redirect permanent /blog/rachelle http://www.monkfish-abbey/blog
18. Log into the new site using the same username/password as the old site.
19. Make sure the URL settings are correct in the Options section.
20. Go to the Options | Permalinks tab and re-save the Permalink options to ensure the site’s permalinks remain the same
21. Turn on any plugins

And also for those interested, here are the four most important plugins we’re using:

1. the_excerpt_reloaded — this is what provides the list of excerpts on the main page
2. Auto-Close Comments — this turns off comments after 21 days to reduce spam opportunities
3. WordPress Hashcash — an excellent spam prevention tool (haven’t tried out the new Akismet yet…
4. CJD Spam Nuke — again, I haven’t checked out Akismet yet.

–Paul