I just successfully migrated my first site out of the big ZATZ Archive zatz.com multisite installation into a standalone site.I wanted to migrate the legacy site located at http://zatz.com/authorpower back to its ancestral home at authorpower.com. Although there are some ZATZ-specific tweaks that will be needed, this lab note details the steps I took to pull off this bit of magic and the tools I used. It took a few tries, so I’ll go with what worked, rather than the rabbit holes I went down first.
BackupBuddy 6.0 on zatz.com: Although multisite was listed as “don’t try this at home,” I threw caution to the wind and installed BackupBuddy 6.0 as a network install on zatz.com. I network-enabled it and set it to save all databases. I also selected the Migrate tab and made myself a copy of importbuddy.php for later use. Then went into the AuthorPower subsite and ran MS Export SA (experimental) from the subsite. I checked which plugins were enabled network-wide (in this case, none) and then ran a backup, saving the result on my local machine.
Fresh folder, fresh database on authorpower.com: I went into my cPanel at the new host and created a new fresh folder and a new fresh database.
ImportBuddy on authorpower.com: Using FTP, I uploaded both importbuddy.php and the backup zip file from BackupBuddy into the main folder of my new authorpower folder. I then went to authorpower.com/importbuddy.php and answered the install, database, and preference questions. The process completed successfully.
Changed PHP to 5.3: One of the home-built plugins I wrote a few years back breaks on anything after 5.3, so I set the PHP version for this site to 5.3. Yes, I will fix the plugin. Just not today.
User view of authorpower.com: I then went to authorpower.com and was very happy to see it looked pretty-much right, if missing a few images. Then I tried logging in. No joy.
Creating an admin user on authorpower.com: As it turns out, by checking PhpMyAdmin from the cPanel dashboard, it became clear there were no user records defined. Yep, that there’s yer problem! Rather than deriving the solution, I found a great tutorial. I also found an easy-to-use tool to create the MD5 password hash. It worked! I was able to login. First thing I did was go to my profile and save the settings, just to make sure everything was updated properly by the core.
Fixing some missing image URLs: As it turns out, a small number of missing images have been missing since the original migration from the Frontier-based sites. I needed to change URLs beginning in images.zatz.com to imageserver.zatzonline.com. To do this, I installed Better Search Replace from the WordPress.org plugin repository and ran those two strings through it. Bingo.
Turning stuff off: Finally, switched back to the ImportBuddy tab (which was still open). ImportBuddy asks you to verify things are functional before it deletes working files. They were, so I did. I also went into the authorpower.com plugins directory and turned off BackupBuddy temporarily and deleted Better Search Replace (I don’t like leaving tools like that just sitting around).
Now, all I have to do is repeat this process for the much bigger ZATZ archive sites and then update my custom redirection plugin to send everyone to the right sites. To quote the great man of metal Jesse James, “All that’s left is everything.”
