jonimueller

You should go to your WordPress.COM blog and export the XML. This packs up the pages, posts and most of the settings (but sometimes not the links/bookmarks or categories — those seem to be crapshoots) so that you can go to your new blog on your domain, login to the back end and under Tools, IMPORT the XML file (which you should have saved to your hard drive during the first export process). Does this make sense? If not, contact me offlist (check my profile) and I can try to help.

Well now the footer copyright says 2009 Sagacity’s recent successes with clients: Entries (RSS) so that’s not right either.

In your settings, there’s a place for the blog’s title. That should probably be Sagacity or Sagacity LLC. Period. If you fix that, it should right itself in the footer and elsewhere.

Plugins still disabled?

Dunerider, that is the Next Gen Gallery plugin.
http://alexrabe.de/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/

The export tool is easy if you just want to move posts and pages. And yep, you can move the plugins and theme files via FTP. I have found that with a site that has a lot of categories, they don’t always seem to migrate or their IDs get screwed up. Also, bookmarks/links don’t survive an export. At least none of mine have.

It does seem to also migrate most of your plugin and other settings but it never hurts to check things out to be sure, do some tire-kicking, once you’ve imported to the new site.

It’s always best to have a copy of the SQL dump IMHO, even if you do elect to do the export/import. You can save some time by installing the WP Backup plugin which will export the SQL file to your hard drive, your server or even email a copy to an email address that you designate, and it will also do this on a scheduled basis. How cool is that?

You’re talking to an old dog, Donald (we won’t say how old, let’s just say the 70s were good to me and leave it at that!). I just didn’t appreciate the analogy since I’ve been working with WordPress since 2004 and yes, it’s come a long way and maybe because I use it everyday, this is lost on me. Shame on me. 🙂

I was confused because your original post seemed to flip between installation and the dashboard and a theme so I wasn’t sure what the problem was. Now I see you were covering several bases at once.

numeeja is correct that the interface has changed dramatically in the last few releases. Here’s an old one for you. To me, the latest version of the WP dashboard looks like the old 2.6x version of the MovableType dashboard. But that’s just me.

For sites with a lot of pages and child pages, I like to use the suckerfish flyout menu plugin but there are other ways to manipulate page and child page displays. Search the plugin repository to find the latest and greatest.

Suckerfish:
http://pixopoint.com/pixopoint-menu/

PageMash:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/

As to your question about managing pages and posts in the Dashboard, it seems somewhat less intuitive to me now. It relies heavily on AJAX so that if I’m at the office (night job) where we use an old and weirdly configured version of IE6, I can’t even update some parts of it. That’s just not right.

But if you click on each section (Posts, Pages, Appearance, Plugins), it will slide open and let you click on individual links within where you can manage all of that.

The one thing that’s really great about the newer versions of WP is that you can now actually install a new plugin right from a zip distro on your hard drive. Forum software has been doing that for years now, about time WP came around. Especially since most everyone who uses WP lives and dies by the almightly plugin! 🙂

Well you aren’t installing WP anew, really. You’d be doing an upgrade because you already have existing content. That’s where the XML file comes into play. That packs up the data (posts, pages, settings — not all settings but most settings) and gets it ready to be pulled into the newly setup WP site elsewhere. In your case, at your shiny new web host account.

You can set up WP the old fashioned way, setting up a specific database and user and linking the user to the database. All this info will be needed to include in the wp-config.php file which you will need to edit in a text editor (Notepad, NOT MS Word!) prior to uploading.

OR since you are fairly new at this, I suggest that you let the Fantastico installer (if it’s a cPanel web host account) or the one-click installer (for Dreamhost) set the new WP site up for you.

THEN once that’s set up, you go into the new WP blog and import the XML file and voila, all your posts and pages will be there.

HTH.