Drupal Content Management System & Wordpress Blog – Week 4
Posted by markFeb 15
Wow, what a week! They just keep getting better and better. I’m writing this post on the Monday of week 5, but it’s a provincial holiday (Family Day) here in Ontario and I didn’t get around to writing it last week so, here goes.
This week saw a lot of research on the Drupal modules and nailing down a concrete page flow-chart that I sent off to the folks at Big Jump Productions.
At the end of the week I was asked for my Wordpress blog files so that they could be uploaded to the web server and made live. I had never done this before and only knew how to do it in theory. Thanks to some wonderful help from the Wordpress community in the form of blogs and forum posts, I successfully got a local install of Wordpress to migrate successfully to a web server for all the world see.
It involved working with phpMyAdmin, and using my text editor (TextWrangler), to search & replace all the instances of “localhost” in my database with the actual URL of the live site. A great resource for this came from here from the folks over at revolution-media.net in Ireland.
The real problem came when I somehow missed a few instances of the old localhost addresses in the database. I didn’t know this at the time. All I know was when I went to visit the blog online and the page looked like just text and html links on a white background. When I moused over any of the links I could see down in my status bar in my browser that they were linking back to their old localhost addresses. Now here is were I made things worse. Instead of going back into my exported databse SQL file and seeing if I had missed any of the localhost links, I opend up my local developement installation of the wordpress site and logged in as administarator. I was looking for anything in the settings that might still be pointing to the old “localhost” address. Of course, I found on the settings page, that there were two such settings. “Wordpress Address (URL)” and “Blog Address (URL)”. In a fatal moment of missguided intuition, I changed them both over to the online URL (ie. www.blog.com). As soon as I clicked the Save Changes button, I was immediately logged out and couldn’t get back in. Confused I went to access phpMyAdmin through MAMP.
Well, trying to even view the Start page in MAMP I was hit with a “403 Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server” message. My heart sunk. Now what? A few google searches later and I found out that what I did, caused Wordpress to place a .htaccess file (which is, by default, hidden on a MAC) and what it contained was causing MAMP to throw up that 403 error. There were a few suggestions on how to fix this, but the best came form here. The last comment contains the best answer IMHO. It’s from catherinwonderland and shows you how to simply show the hidden file and delete it. It’s that simple.
So, that got MAMP working again, but I still could’t log into the local site. Rather than waste any more time trying to hack PHP files or dig through the mySQL database (which is where I was about to go next), I remembered I did a complete system backup of my computer on Friday. That backup contained, amongst other things, the complete Wordpress site and database. It was all contained in the MAMP folder, in the applications folder, on the MAC. I renamed the MAMP folder that was there and copied over the MAMP folder form the external backup drive. Problem solved! And a BIG lesson learned. Don’t mess with settings that effect your site on a root level. You could lock yourself out, like I did.
Well, it’s back to work tomorrow and I can’t wait. The Wordpress blog is going to be live and will only require routine maintenance and administration from now on. The Drupal CMS will hopefully be ready for a test session by week’s end. I’ll keep you posted





