nilo@mindspring.com

I am up to point 6, will finish tomorrow. I also still need to tweak the theme a little to more closely match my old site. So far so good. I already exported everything into an xml file from the old site and will try to import tomorrow. What about my menu structure, should I set that up before I am import? I am not sure how the content on my pages will fall into place if I do an import. It seems to me I will have to set up the pages first and use the exact same names, otherwise how will it know to import that data to the right page. If you have some steps I should follow that would be helpful.

Josh, how do I duplicate the clean version of wordpress when it so massively different than what was on the old server. I wouldn’t know where to start. it seems to me the for the database to work properly I will need to exactly duplicate the file structure on the old server on the new server. I have done this, but still cannot login. I did try to duplicate the exact file structure from the download (plus a few extra files) and this also failed.

Optional Reading:
The wordpress I downloaded has 3 folders and 16 files. Very clean. The wordpress from my old server is 13 levels deep, starting with the /docs folder and then within that folder the 16 same files (plus a few more) and another /docs with the 16 files and another /docs folder and then that goes on for 11 more levels and then finally on the 13th level I get what looks like the clean version of wordpress I downloaded. What the previous 12 levels have to do with anything, I have no idea. One point that is important, the first 12 levels look like duplicates of each other with the exact same files in each one. My first thought was to bag the first 12 levels and just put the 13th level in at the root, that way it looks like a normal wordpress installation, but I could not log-in with that set up.

OK, I think I understand where you are going. I was hoping not to have to upload the 11gb to the new server as it will take a while (at least 24 hours) but to duplicate the exact structure I will have to upload everything whereas originally I was trying to save time and only upload one layer since most the files appear to be duplicates. I will proceed to upload everything and then extract the wordpress 2.5.2 exactly to where it was on the old server. This makes sense, I just wish I could upload quicker or not have to upload everything. Talk to you in a little bit, unless you have more feedback.

On weekends I am on a Mac. During the week it is a PC. My mac has much faster downloads and uploads.
I know this will look crazy but my first instance of the wp-admin folder on my old server for example is: /public/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/docs/wp-admin

My solution is to remove all these doc files and just load the heart of the wordpress site which is found in the directory above with the wp-admin (also includes wp-content and htaccess and index.php etc).

So I have successfully uploaded these file to my new server under /public so for example wp-admin is /public/wp-admin.