Backing up and transferring your Serendipity or Wordpress blog

I use Serendipity (www.s9y.org) and Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) extensively for all my sites, both are excellent scripts and whilst they're both blog scripts, they have different strengths.

Most bloggers seem to prefer Wordpress, I think this is because they don't know Serendipity exists, being a more used script Wordpress is more visible, so of course more themes and plugins exist for it. Serendipity on the other hand offers true multilingual blogging right from first install, and uses the smarty template language which makes it a lot easier to customize a site than Wordpress.

I recently had a problem with a host and needed to urgently move my sites, and honestly I'm not an expert on dealing with databases so I like transfer procedures to be simple. So, here's a quick guide to moving a site from one host to another.

Begin by logging into the old host FTP server for your site, and download all the files in your blog folder including;

Wordpress: the wp-content folder
Serendipity: the themes, plugins, and uploads folder

Then upload all files to your new host using FTP. At this point all of your files and uploads have been transferred, but this isn't the end, you also need to transfer your database so that everything works.

In your old host, login into the host control panel and under the database settings go to phpMyAdmin. Click the database name for the site you're transferring, and export the database making sure that you select all tables under the export tab. Then check the box that says 'Save as file', and give the export a filename you'll remember. Finally click go to save the database to your computer.

In the control panel of your new host, create a new database and user in the database settings, and then once you've created the database, login to phpMyAdmin and click import, then click the browse button and upload the file you previously downloaded from your old host.

If all has gone to plan you should now have all files transferred, and your database transferred, and now we go to the last step, making it all work.

You'll need to re-install both Wordpress or Serendipity, but don't worry, you're not going to lose any of your data. Both are intelligent enough to only install what is needed. So, login into the new host site using FTP and delete the following files;

Wordpress: wp-config.php
Serendipity: serendipity_config_local.inc.php

Then in your browser, type in the URL of your blog. For both Wordpres and Serendipity you should see the new install screen. For Wordpress follow the procedures as they are defined, and for Serendipity follow the simple install button. Once you've done this, you should see your blog on your new host just as it was on the old host.