In my last post I told you about a text editor.  Have you tried it? Isn’t it awesome? If you have not tried it, try it now!

Now comes the hard part – how to move the blog from one url to another. What do I need to do. WordPress has a terrific tutorial for Moving WordPress which I followed.

Step 1 – Copy ALL the files for the current blog to your hard drive as a backup. Backup your database following the Backup Database tutorial from WordPress. As a safeguard, also use the Backup Database Plugin to save another copy to your hard drive. Make a copy of each of the articles that you have posted to the blog over the years. You can never be too safe, I figure.

Step 2 – Login to your blog.

Step 3 – Go to the Administration > Settings > General panel.

Step 4 – In the box for WordPress address (URI): change the address to the new location of your main WordPress core files (The main files like index.php).

Step 5 – In the box for Blog address (URI): change the address to the new location, which should match the WordPress address (URI).

NOTE: It is very important that you do Steps 4 and 5 BEFORE you go to the next step of moving your files.

Step 6 – Click Save Settings.

Step 7 – Log out of your blog. Do NOT try to open or view your blog now.

NOTE: Once I clicked the update option I got a blank page. No way to log out so I closed all open windows.

Step 8 – WordPress 2.0 only: Delete the folder wp-content/cache. NOTE: I did not do this step as I was using a later version of WordPress.

Step 9 – Move your WordPress core files to the new location. This includes the files found within the original directory, and all the sub-directories, to the new location.

Step 10 – If you are using Permalinks, go to the Settings > Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure to your .htaccess file, which should be in the same directory as the main index.php file.

NOTE: Since I had also copied my .htaccess file to the new directory, I simply checked it to make sure it was still setup the same way.

Step 11 – Go to the new url and make sure you can view the new blog and that everything appears to be intact. It was.

Step 12 – Next I deleted ALL of the files fom the old blog directory and uploaded a new .htaccess file with the following lines of code to the old blog directory.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.bloggingjunction.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I had used the same file names for the new directory as the old file names.

Step 13 – I checked the old file names to make sure they were indeed redirected to the new file names.

Simple as that. I now have my old blog in its new domain.