DNS help and am I on the right track?

  • Resolved beengone

    (@beengone)


    11 years, 6 months ago

    Hey all, new to WP. A few years ago I did some Joomla/Mambo sites and am jumping in again head first. I have a few client sites I need to get moving and I’m having some trouble. Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish.

    I’ll give the most complicated example. I’m making a city website. They have an existing site that’s currently live. Eventually I’ll take over the domain and redirect it to my site. We’ll say it’s cityx.org. I started a HostGator reseller account and created an account for cityx giving them 1GB space/ 10GB bandwidth. I’ll monitor it, but I doubt they’ll even reach 150 MB / 1GB. They will mostly use it for links, calendars, announcements and a small handful of pictures. Eventually I hope to get them to move to online bill payments, but that’s a ways off.

    1) Does that sound good or is my allocation off?

    Right now I have the primary domain set up in HostGator as cityx.mycompany.com and I’m using Hover for my domains. There I have a CNAME record pointing cityx.mycompany.com to the URL of the website (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/~cityx/wpsite) Host doesn’t resolve. I asked Hover about it through their tickets, but nothing so far. Hopefully someone here is faster.

    2) Any idea on the DNS issue?
    3) Is my process correct so far?

    Backing up a couple steps, after creating the space through HG, I add WP and want to go to town. I have to update the PHP settings though MyPHPAdmin due to the temporary domain/IP stuff. I think I have a good handle on that. When I go live, I’ll update those entries again to show cityx.com

    4) Look good here? Any trouble when the domain gets redirected?

    Then comes the actual WP building. I’m sure I’ll have more questions later, but so far that’s both well-documented and straight forward, at least as I see it.

    Any help on any of the above questions would be fantastic. Or, if you have other tips or cautions I’m all ears.

    Thanks all.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Andrew Bartel

    (@andrew-bartel)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    1. Yea you’re fine, it’s not like Host Gator is going to give you a hard time if you call up and offer them more money.

    2. Why are you using this methodology? Just develop on your subdomain and then migrate on launch. How long have you been waiting? DNS can take 2-3 days to propagate.

    3. Ja

    4. Remember, WordPress is a template driven system with its own way of doing things. Familiarize yourself with add_action/do_action and add_filter/apply_filter. Understand child themes and why they are critically important. Learn to love get_template_part(). Keep in mind WordPress functions more smoothly when you use its built in stuff, i.e. use wp_redirect() instead of header(), use functions.php and custom plugins instead of includes, use wp_mail instead of mail(), etc etc etc.

    Post more if you have specific questions. In the mean time, check out wordpress.stackexchange.com and consider joining the wp-hackers mailing list. Happy coding!

    Thread Starter beengone

    (@beengone)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    Tons of help there, thanks. One follow-up.

    2) You say develop on my subdomain and I am, but that’s the redirect that isn’t working. Or I am misunderstanding what you’re saying? Maybe you’re saying install another instance of WP on my domain and move it later? Is that better?

    I’ll really dig into the templates and see what happens. Most of these sites will be pretty basic, so an off-the-shelf template with gui modifications should do 90% of what I need. I need to know why it works though for troubleshooting and moving forward.

    Thanks again.

    Andrew Bartel

    (@andrew-bartel)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    Sure. Unless you’re running a dedicated or virtual dedicated server where you have real control, dealing with hosting companies can be a pain. I have had great experiences with host gator, in fact that’s what our company uses for our shared hosting solutions clients. That said, we still handle development locally on the server located in the server room fifty feet away. If that’s not available, doing it on a subdomain, using a plugin like WP Maintenance Mode and settings a no index, no follow robots tag allows you develop like the site isn’t publicly available and throw fatal errors to your heart’s content. Do install a complete, isolated copy of WordPress on your subdomain, develop there, and then migrate.

    Then, when you’re ready to go live, use WP Migrate DB to run a find and replace on your database. As long as you don’t set absolute links in your code, you will migrate smoothly. That plugin will even do the find replace on the serialized arrays WP stores most of the actual data in. If you go the extra step and use git, you can move a client’s site in five minutes.

    Once you get the hang of it, this process, imo, is vastly preferable to sorting through dns records and waiting for propagation and calling hosting companies and pointing name servers, etc.

    Re: absolute links, WP does prefer them, so use home_url(), plugins_url(), get_template_directory_uri() and other link functions provided by WP rather than relative urls.

    Thread Starter beengone

    (@beengone)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    This has been very helpful. I have a lot to learn. Thank you for pointing out specifics to get me focused.

    Thread Starter beengone

    (@beengone)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    Andrew,
    Would you mind, if you have the time, stepping me through this briefly. I’ve tried this three different ways and none seem to work as I’d like. When you say subdomain, you mean something like subdomain.mydomain.com, right? I set that up, but redirected to another IP thinking that would solve having to remember an IP address, but would also keep me from having to migtrate a finished site. All I’d have to do is update DNS and edit the PHP info, changing all entries for subdomain.mydomain.com to customerdomain.com.

    Sorry, but I’m missing something here and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

    Thread Starter beengone

    (@beengone)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    I fear marking as solved may have shot me in the foot, but here goes. Would I be better off running a web server on my local machine? If so, I just have to enable Apache, install PHP and MySQL and then load up WP, right? I’m sure it’s a big more complicated, but I’m pretty sure I can find instructions. This would be the fastest way to develop, right? No more waiting for page refreshes, correct?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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