Moving to WordPress 3.0

Since I’ve already taken the plunge and moved over to WordPress 3.0 and consolidated my various separate WordPress 2.X installs to it, I thought it would be good to document the process I used to try and help others who might be wary of taking the plunge. There are unlimited ways that you may have your particular install set up, so this may or may not apply. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.

It may be obvious, but before you do ANYTHING with your WP install, back up your files and your database. Backing up your files is as easy as downloading your install directory locally via FTP, and if you aren’t familiar with how to back up your database (YOU SHOULD BE BACKING UP YOUR DATABASE REGULARLY) there are good instructions here. Go back up your site, and come back when you’re done.

Everything safe? Ok, now…you want to go to your WordPress dashboard, hit Tools, and Export. What you’ll get is an XML file of all the content from your blog: posts, categories, tags, authors, etc. Save this in a very, very safe place. This is the file that you will use to import your blog into your new WP 3.0 site. Repeat this step for every blog you hope to move, renaming the Export file into something recognizable.

In my particular instance, I had a site set up that went like this: at the root level of my website, I had just a flat HTML file that was my homepage. I had two different WordPress 2.X installs in subdirectories (/wp and /eliza). What I wanted to do was to install WP3.0 in my root directory, and then use the Multisite functionality built in to WP3.0 to re-create the /wp and /eliza blogs, running in the single root-level install.

After backing everything up, I went ahead and installed WP3.0 in the root directory. There is then one bit of manual code you have to add in order to enable multisite capabilities. In your wp-config.php file, just before the line

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

You need to add the line

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

This enables multisite capabilities. You’ll have to do a little bit of copy/paste into your .htaccess file, but WP walks you through it. When you log into your install again, you’ll see a new set of controls in your dashboard relating to these new capabilities.

One more bit of editing is needed before you move on to creating new blogs and importing your XML files into them…by default, WordPress filters imported XML by removing possible troublesome tags…unfortunateely, including things like <embed> and <iframe> and other instances where you’ve included content in your posts. WordPress does so via a file you can find in /wp-includes called kses.php. In kses.php, you’ll want to scroll down to line 1309 and comment out the three lines under //Post filtering so that they look like this:

// Post filtering
#add_filter('content_save_pre', 'wp_filter_post_kses');
#add_filter('excerpt_save_pre', 'wp_filter_post_kses');
#add_filter('content_filtered_save_pre', 'wp_filter_post_kses');

This will prevent the filter from removing all your youtube videos, slideshare embed, scribd documents, etc. Once you’ve altered the filter and saved it, you’re ready to create your new blogs, hit the Tools menu, and import your XML from your exports above. After the process completes, you should have a working blog with all of your previous content in place exactly as before.

For my particular case, it was important for me to maintain the existing directory paths for /wp and /eliza so as to not break tons of incoming links…WP3.0 handles that perfectly. After all this, I now have WordPress running at the root level of jasongriffey.net, Pattern Recognition and Brand New World working exactly as they were with the separate installs (including permalinks!), and will be moving my previously flat-file homepage into WordPress pages. I’ve got my whole site running on WordPress, and the ability to create new blogs at will in order to expand my setup.

I’m chuffed about the setup, and really, really excited about the possibilities with WordPress 3.0.

His successes and failures are relative; while he died broke and lonely, his work laid the foundation for much of our current thinking about electricity and just about anything having to do with waves. As an inventor, a thinker, and a contributing member of the scientific community he was wildly successful. He was a firm believer in gender equality, a vegetarian, and a developer of powerful weapons. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of his success were some of his ideas which later resulted in the decline of Tesla’s reputation. These ideas were grand, difficult to prove or explain, and even more difficult to monetize.

Irregardless of his definition of success, Tesla lived and worked in a world where people made discoveries about the natural forces that surrounded them at an unprecedented pace. Inventions harnessed the powers of these forces, and patents secured future income from these inventions. Tesla was only good at part of this equation. He was relatively fastidious about securing patents, but lost the part about negotiating the future incomes from these patents.

Where does this fit into the open source business model? It’s easy to get into a pity party for Tesla, complaining about greedy robber barons who stole his ideas and made huge fortunes while he toiled away in a mostly self-funded laboratory. And it’s not easy to really grasp the meaning of “open source business model.”

So what is an open source business model? How can a company give away its products for free and still make money? The answer to this question is nuanced and almost completely dependent on the individual company. For many businesses, income is based on providing a service, creating something, and customizing open source platforms for a client. For other businesses, in the words of Dirk Riehle, “Using a commercial open source approach, firms can get to market faster with a superior product at lower cost than possible for traditional competitors.”

Tesla’s self funded lab and obsession with new discoveries fall in the latter category. His operation was nimble and forward-looking, while companies like The Edison Company were stogy. Once they invested huge amounts of resources in something like direct current electricity, they were stuck, and went to great lengths to stay stuck. At one point during the development of the Niagra Falls generators, Tesla claimed that he could transmit the electric generated there without the tremendous amounts of copper, trees, and other resources that would have to be committed to the project, but the contracts were signed and this lighter, less resource-intensive implementation wouldn’t, and can’t be possible.

Some of the modern comparable situations are obvious: Unix to Apple, Google to Microsoft, and Microsoft’s sponsorship of BarCamps and open source code sprints make fascinating parallels to the early days of electricity. It seems that in the days of more democratized communication, the nimble and forward-looking may have their day.

Some further reading:

I’ve personally read and can strongly recommend the biography Wizard: The Life and Times of Nicola Tesla by Marc Seifer, an incredibly thorough look at all aspects of Tesla’s life; business, social, family and even some Freudian analysis, and also recommend the PBS documentary Tesla: Master of Lightning.