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Be carefull when moving site and using dropbox (when moving from one computer to another). For me it costed 5 hours until I find out that dropbox was not finished to copy all the files, and I was alreadyt then copying to htdocs directory and of course with not all files and then very frustrated that I cannot find why site does not work after moving.

Thanks so much for the tutorial! It seems like the wordpress codex is written by and for people with mild autism. I guess I needed to be guided by the hand!

Thank you again for sharing your knowledge in a complete step-by-step way. I return here everytime I run into a wordpress glitch. A new question related to this tutorial, “How to Move WordPress to a Different Server and Web Address”: I have been using your method (updated to preserve the plugins now that the databases are serialized — thanks hugely on that!) when I move a site from development to make it live.

When I create a site for a client, I usually put up a nice temporary home page (or leave the old site up when making a new one) while I develop the new site in a subdirectory. This was a great technique when I was coding html and php. With WordPress, it’s a bit more complex, partly because often I cannot just develop the site using MAMP on my harddrive, because the client needs access to add content. So, seems I have 2 choices when it’s time to go live:

Create a redirect to the subdirectory, which then makes the site appear to be in the root, but makes other things more complex, like creating and linking to subdirectories to hold large tif files for media access, for example.

What I usually do is follow your instructions above, moving the site to the root and also removing all the old htm and php and image files associated with the old site.

My question today is: would there be a better practice for this, a more elegant solution, such as changing something simple with the htaccess file, or using the natural heirarchy (priority load order) of the default files, so that I could develop the hidden wordpress site in the root directory, while the temporary or old site still shows to the public? (e.g., what could I name the .htm or .php file that I want public and still have the home.php or index.php file that WP shows working and a blink URL for me and the client while developing?

Then, making it live would be more staightforward. Possible? Thank you.

@figaro
Yes, we do similar things to develop then make the site live. I was just thinking about the priority load order of default files, and thought perhaps there was a way to use that, say, for example, if welcome.htm (temp page or small old site) would load before index.php (from WP), then we could develop in the same directory and not have to deal with the hassle of steps when finally making the new WP site live… thanks for your response.