Here’s a fun scenario:
Say you spend hours and hours on a custom theme,try to repair damaged SEO, sign up for Google Analytics for your client, create a Paypal shopping cart ( add to cart buttons,but for over 50 products-that’s work) sign up for a FeedBurner account as well. Get all your ducks in a row, finally only to have your host reset the shared server in such a way that you cannot any longer have use of the IIS admin console-without which all your links break and you must rethink navigation and put in place ugly urls. Because at least those work.
Then because you have had it anyway with IIS you take it upon yourself to buy an account with the host you personally use but they’re having server problems. In fact, they just finished a new server set up just when you signed up and the kinks weren’t quite worked out.
So what usually took one day took 4, all the while you were stressing because the domain name registrar was being an **shole. For some reason taking it very personally that you wanted to manage the domain from now on and not knowing if he was going to cooperate.
So I had 2 accounts.
One wouldn’t load any pages without a 500 error.
The other wouldn’t let me set up permalinks the way I wanted.
Both hosts wouldn’t answer their phones.
Both hosts were having server issues.
Probably why they couldn’t answer their phones.
And the domain name was in the hands of a jerk.
This was so stressful that I last responded to a support email from the new account host so irritatingly unhelpful and backward and asking for my info all over again before they could start to do anything(even though I had 2 open support tickets for that account and the username was clearly stated in the body of the ticket) with a one line email: you people are useless.
Things only began to get better around 9:30 pm all of a sudden I could install WP on the new account-the install.php file was no longer triggering a 500 error message.That meant I could import the RSS file.
Then I could get all the page ids in the right places(those get mixed up if you use the import tool-page ids are not assigned the same numbers.So if you use this tool expect to have to fix those-if you customized the loop to exclude or include certain posts or pages ids).Which I had for the top navigation and the sidebars.
If I had to do it all over again I might not use the import tool for static pages…but then I’d still have to set those up all over again,anyway.So I’m not sure how to avoid this. Maybe you just can’t?
It must have someting to do with the order in which pages and posts were handled on the old installation.
The wordpress database assigns a numbered page id to a new page you create. Delete that page and the next one you create gets it’s own page id. It doesn’t get the number of the one you just deleted. I think. Anyway I’ll shut up about that because I am not sure if that’s how it works.
The WP import tool isn’t a fix it quick tool. You will have to do a lot of double checking to make sure things are set up properly. And of course you’ll have to sort out plugins,themes, and options and set the home and posts pages to what you want, and fix the sidebar widgets into place,etc.
Because a fresh install is set to default on all of those.I probably could have just used the exact copy of wordpress I was using on the old site but I wanted a new clean copy,just in case.
But all in all it is better than using phpadmin if the thought of looking at mySQL tables is terrifying to you.And I am not sure if the sql file database backup won’t do the exact same thing the WP import tool does…
I didn’t end up using the .sql file I downloaded from phpadmin,anyway because I noticed it recorded the paths using the old hosts path to my client’s document root.Not knowing squat about sql I decided not to get into yet another situation that might cause a whole new set of errors.
The next bit of good news is the domain registrant has taken pity on me and actually transferred ownership to me. I got the support email from Godaddy just now.I accepted the transfer and pointed the nameservers to the new ones.
So I’m almost out of the woods.I still have to get the domain pointed to the new account at the new host site and of course got an error message when I tried to do just that.