bobafred

This is a note to all my WordPress readers out there: Don’t do what I just did. First, some background.

I wanted a local WP install so I could make changes to my site on a non-live version. Previous to this, new development took place in a secretly hidden folder called boba_new under the main site. Secretive, huh? To accomplish this, I spent yesterday afternoon installing the various pieces and for the most part, this all went smoothly and I had a working base WP install. Here’s where the fun started.

I figured that since I do daily backups of the db, I would import that into my new local WP db. That way I don’t have to makeup test posts or whatever to actually have some content. Makes sense. What I forgot to remember was that not only does the backup contain posts and comments, but blog settings too. So, by importing all these, I effectively pointed my local WP admin to my live WP admin. Then, thinking I was in the local WP admin, I mistakenly changed the live WP admin to point to the local WP admin. At this point I could login to both, but could not change any of the settings. I had created a circle of non-workingness. This also destroyed the pointers to the themes. If you visited my site around 6:00 pm or so yesterday, you would have seen this.

The solution was that I had to go in and do updates to the wp_options table. The updates to fix this are:

update wp_options set option_value='http://yoursite_url' where option_name='home';

update wp_options set option_value='http://yoursite_url' where option_name='siteurl';

A very handy page for situations like this is the Database description from the WP Codex. This page also came in handy when I imported my comments from another commenting system.

The good news is that I have learned from my mistake. I think that I am going to look into dumping the db into separate files. One for posts/comments and the other for settings.