Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Site migration and WordPress upgrade complete

Whew! I am quite relieved at last to have completed the site migration required by my blog web host (POWWEB) which was recently purchased by a new company. The servers used by POWWEB customers are changing, and while this change should be transparent to web visitors, it proved to be a pain as well as a good learning experience for me. It also provided the nudge I’ve needed to upgrade my WordPress blog to version 2, which has been out for several months. I had previously been running WordPress 1.5, and because of security vulnerabilities (primarily) I knew it was a good idea to upgrade. This experience helped me get more familiar with the process of not only backing up my WordPress blog (which I’ve done before) but also restoring it to a new WordPress installation.

The following is a minorly edited screen capture of the POWWEB SiteTools “Instant Installer” screen. You can see there are a wide variety of web-based tools available for users to install. POWWEB gives customers five different MySQL databases, and previously I had just used two: One for my primary WordPress blog (this one) and one for a Moodle experiment on podcasting.

Available web applications in POWWEB

Now that my site and primary WordPress blog have been migrated, I hope to get the following projects going in upcoming weeks:

  1. Create a new WordPress blog which I will use to post my thoughts related to Christianity and my personal journey of faith. I’m planning at this point to call it “Eyes Right,” based on Hebrews 12:2.
  2. Create a new Moodle installation, and set up open/free courses for anyone interested on Distributed Learning (basically a menu of available read/write web tools and other instructional modalities for blended learning,) a course on Technology Leadership (focused on resources for principals and superintendents relating to technology leadership issues,) and a course on Network Security (for district CIOs, Assistant Superintendents for Technology, Tech Directors and IT support staff members)
  3. Create a searchable and interactive web-based database of 1:1 research studies (based on the one I helped create last summer at the ADE Institute) that I’ll be adding to as part of my dissertation literature review.

I will also be tempted to try several of the other available web applications that POWWEB offers. I’ve especially wanted to give both JOOMLA and DRUPAL a try, in reorganizing my personal website and Tools for the TEKS website. Those projects are lower priority, however, and will have to wait a bit longer! At least this site migration is complete, and it appears everything on my blog is working as it should. If you run into broken images or other problems, please don’t hesitate to let me know. 🙂

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On this day..


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2 responses to “Site migration and WordPress upgrade complete”

  1. Devin Henley Avatar
    Devin Henley

    Your one of the lucky ones that has made the move with powweb during the buy out. The Endurance International Group has bought poweb and is migrating all their servers over to their datacenter. Granted I’m not huge fan of overselling servers just to make a buck.

    Wes, I offer both Joomla and Drupla to my customers and for me I would go with Joomla. With 1.5 just around the corner things are looking bright. There are tons of skins for free or for the purchace. The amount of plugins are unreal.
    Drupla is not for the faint of heart. It can do more out of the box, and is a better CMS for a high volume site. The setup time is larger with Drupla and it’s not as easy to find what you need.

  2. Michael Wagner Avatar

    “I’m planning at this point to call it “Eyes Right,” based on Hebrews 12:2.”

    I like your name for the personal blog. I was a pastor (Dallas Theological Semnary grad) before I moved into the marketplace.

    We’re facing something like what you have gone through; migrating and upgrading WordPress. I’ve forwarded a link to my biz partner of this post. He’s the technical one on the team.

    Thanks for sharing your technology journey as well!

    Keep creating,
    Mike