Building a website for a friend

jmcc

Raekwon wrote: »

Anyway he hasn't even registered the .ie domain name with the IEDR yet and he didn't seem too keen when I told him to fax off his details and reasons for claiming the domain to them with a VAT number, if he has one.

It would be cheaper and perhaps more efficient to register the .ie domain through a .ie registrar.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Raekwon wrote: »

Is it possible to move the entire Wordpress site to the .ie domain? If I could move across to the .ie domain then I could simply downgrade the .com domain and redirect to it.

It may be possible to set the base URL with Wordpress for the .ie. The only risk would be that the search engines see the .com and the .ie site with the same content. If it is going to take some time to sort out the 301 redirect then just have the .ie (as it will be the primary website) live. The URL for the site is set in the General > Settings screen so it may be possible to shift it to the .ie very simply. The only problem might be if you had used static URLs for images. Some Wordpress experts here may be able to confirm that this is possible.

Regards...jmcc

Essien

I don't know about setting both sites up in parallel but if you want to change all instances of the .com URL within Wordpress, I find the best way is to export the database and just do a find/replace in a text editor. There are plugins and things out there that will help you with exporting your site but I'm not sure how they handle changing static urls like stuff hard coded into the template (terrible practice, you would need to edit template files here as well as the db) or links within the content.

If you do need to set both up I'd guess your best bet would be to treat them as 2 unique sites, I can't imagine Wordpress handling it very well any other way

Trojan

Essien wrote: »

I don't know about setting both sites up in parallel but if you want to change all instances of the .com URL within Wordpress, I find the best way is to export the database and just do a find/replace in a text editor.

Don't do this, it won't change them all correctly because WordPress stores options as serialized PHP strings in the database. This means that if the domains are different lengths (and they will be if it's a straight swap .com for .ie) then the options strings will break.

It's a pain but you'll need to use a method that maintains the correct lengths for the serialized strings - this is a safe find/replace script.

You can also manually export, editing content and string lengths and re-import but you need to be very careful when editing.

Essien

Trojan wrote: »

Essien wrote: »

I don't know about setting both sites up in parallel but if you want to change all instances of the .com URL within Wordpress, I find the best way is to export the database and just do a find/replace in a text editor.

Don't do this, it won't change them all correctly because WordPress stores options as serialized PHP strings in the database. This means that if the domains are different lengths (and they will be if it's a straight swap .com for .ie) then the options strings will break.

It's a pain but you'll need to use a method that maintains the correct lengths for the serialized strings - this is a safe find/replace script.

You can also manually export, editing content and string lengths and re-import but you need to be very careful when editing.

Really? I've done it heaps of times and only ever ran into that once, and even that time the issue only affected a plugin.

Trojan

If the domains happened to be the same length coincidentally, then it won't break anything as the serialized data count will be correct. If not, then you could lose widgets and other settings - some of it quite subtle and difficult to diagnose

Raekwon

Cheers for all the advice

I've decided to just create the exact same site on the .ie domain as I know all the plug-ins that I need etc so it shouldn't be too much effort to set everything up the same.

It's not ideal but it seems the less stressful way.