Basic process for moving a Weblogs.us WordPress hosted blog to -> CPanel

Recently we had a blogger using his Weblogs.us blog as a full featured temp site before pushing the finished product out to a client’s GoDaddy CPanel hosted site. He asked me to assist with the process and I was happy to help 🙂

Since I was doing these steps anyway I thought I would write up a basic overview of the process here:

  1. Backup existing CPanel site
  2. Export WordPress MySQL database from Weblogs.us blog, normally wp_whateveryourblogis (mysqldump generated .sql file)
  3. Download all files from Weblogs.us blog via FTP to local PC (your workstation)
  4. Create wp_yourblog database in CPanel (using CPanel MySQL wizards, phpmyadmin or similar)
  5. Create wp_yourblog user and give appropriate permissions in CPanel for thewp_yourblog database (using CPanel MySQL wizards, phpmyadmin or similar)
  6. Import mysqldump generated wp_yourblog.sql into CPanel (using phpmyadmin or similar)
  7. Manually adjust the relevant records in the table wp_options URLs to point to new URL instead of old weblogs.us URL (generally two fields need to be updated, use phpmyadmin or similar)
  8. Upload all files from local PC (your workstation) via FTP to CPanel public_html directory
  9. Edit wp-config.php to specify database host as localhost (or whatever the CPanel setup specified for the MySQL server’s address/IP
Lastly, you may need to make some changes to the PHP configuration on the new CPanel host if the memory or upload limits are set too low etc.
Those are the basics! Watch for hard coded URLs that refer to the old weblogs.us blog, use relative URLs instead to avoid this issue.
I am very proud that Weblogs.us provides the free capabilities to do almost anything that paid hosting services can. 🙂