Today is the most beautiful day in my blogging life. I began to start blogging a couple weeks ago. At first, my main purpose of blogging is just to fill my time in with something. You might think I am lazy bum who got nothing to do other than sitting in front of my laptop surfing internet. Treeeeet!! That’s wrong my friend. Actually I have a life, a well paid job, and a love of my life. :-). In facts, right now I′m sitting on my chair out in the middle of Taiwan Sea. (I′m currently working right now). If you see my other post, you’ll understand. :-)

Ok…ok…enough with that. The topic of today is Transfer WordPress.com Blog to A Web Host. As I was saying, today is the most beautiful day of my blogging life. I have successfully installed or transferred my WordPress.com blog to a web host. So, I want to share some knowledge with my fellow bloggers.

Here we go. For a start, I assume most of you have WordPress.com account already. The first thing you will ever need to edit your WordPress installation on your own machine is Webserver . There is so many webserver on the internet available for download, but for mine, I use XAMPPlite since I’m more comfortable with it.

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INSTALL LOCAL WEBSERVER

This option is for you who want to experiment something on your blog before making it official. Go to XAMPP and download the lite version. This is to make your computer as a temporary server so that you can run WordPress on your own computer without having to connect to the Internet. Extract XAMPP to C:.

Go to AMPSTART and download a little add-on for XAMPP user on Windows Vista especially Vista Home Premium. After downloading, extract AMPSTART.exe into XAMPP folder and make a shortcut of it (AMPSTART.exe) to your desktop. After successfully launch XAMPP using AMPSTART, configure your installation by pointing your browser to http://localhost. Don’t forget to create a database for Word Press using PhpMyAdmin. You can find this on your XAMPP page. Enter “WordPress” (without quotes) in the “Create New Database” Field, and select utf8_unicode_ci in the drop down box in the next field (as shown in the picture below). Click on Create. The XAMPP setup is now complete

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INSTALL WORDPRESS ON LOCAL WEBSERVER

Next, visit WordPress.org to download their latest release of Word Press. Take this opportunity to download some of the plug-in that may interest you. I will not post here any recommendation on plugins since I’m planning to do some reviews about that. After you finished downloading, extract WordPress to htdocs folder inside XAMPP folder. The folder should be like this


C:xampplitehtdocs [your browser will translate this as http://localhost]

You can also extract WordPress into a new folder e.g. blog

C:xamplitehtdocsblog [your browser will translate this as http://localhost/blog]

Now, browse to your newly extracted WordPress folder and look for a file named wp-config-sample.php. Open it in your favourite text editor and replace the default values by the ones you see under this paragraph. Save the file as wp-config.php (under the same folder).

// ** MySQL settings ** //

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database

define(’DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username

define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password (needs to be empty, just

for local install)

define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change

this value

Now all you have to do is to run the installation by pointing your browser to http://localhost/blog/wp-admin/install.php , follow the instructions.

 

RE-CUSTOMIZE YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALLATION

Now you have WordPress working on your computer, your next step would be exporting your posts, comments, custom fields, and categories from your WordPress.com blog. Go to your WordPress.com blog, log into your admin panel and under manage tab, click on export. Save the xml file to your computer. After that, log into your local WordPress admin panel, import the xml. Next, point your browser to http://yourblogname.wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php, right click on the page and view the source. Save the source in xml format. Later, go to your local WordPress admin panel, click on blogroll and import the link which you just saved.

Doing this would take a long time if you have a monstrous collection of links, but it’s better than have to type each one of them. Ok, after you import the link, you have to re-categorize each of them.

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TRANSFERRING LOCAL WORDPRESS TO ONLINE WEBSERVER

So, by now you have the exact copy of your WordPress.com blog. Next is to transfer your blog to a web host. You are now free to download and install any available plugins to your WordPress. This can save your time to upload them to the internet.

Once you’re ready to publish your blog online, first you need a host and domain name. Most of the host either paid or free provide a domain for your use so you don’t have to be worried about domain name unless you’re planning to get yourself a unique domain name.

A heed up on looking for a host, find a reliable host. Paid hosting is recommended, but there is also plenty of free hosting out there that you might want to consider. Either way, you will need a reliable host so that your blog won’t disappear after a couple of weeks. Take some time to do some research. Find a host which has been long enough in the business, read their customer feedback, that’s helps you to get an idea of how reliable the host is.

Ok, now that you have everything, all you need is a couple more steps and you’re done!

Backup your local XAMPP MySQL database using the WordPress Backup Plugin. Download the plug-in HERE. After activating the plugin, login to your WordPress Admin area, activate the plugin, go to Manage, and download a backup. Browse to your backup file, unzip it and open the file with Microsoft WordPad and replace all instances of http://www.yoursite.com WITH http://yoursite.com. Save and close your SQL file.

Log on to your hosting account or your web server and create a new MySQL database for WordPress, call it whatever you want. Once you have created your new database, note down the username and database name, you might find it useful later. Next, look for PHPMyAdmin, and open it. In case you don’t know how to log in PhpMyAdmin, use your username and database name which you jog down earlier. Click the name of the database you just created from the dropdown menu on your left. At the top of the screen it should say

“Server: your_server(probably localhost) Database: your_database_name”.

Click the Import Tab and browse to your SQL file, the one you download from your local XAMPP database. Click Go button. If everything went smooth, you should get a message at the top stating: “Import has been successfully finished, XXX queries executed”.

Your new database is now ready to go, exit PHPMyAdmin.

Browse to your local WordPress installation. Open up your wp-config.php file and input the MySQL details (username, password, etc.) of the new database you created in the previous step. Save and close wp-config.php. Upload the whole contents of your local WordPress folder to the new location on your web server. This new location MUST be the same as the details in your SQL file. Should any the locations differs, your WordPress will not work. Alas, that is the end of this article. You should by now have a working WordPress blog online on your web hosting or web server. Have fun!.

References:

Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP
Convert A Local WordPress XAMPP Installation Into A Live Site
How to change your password using PhpMyAdmin

Written by: nyunyu @ http://www.nyunyu.info