You know, I don’t really like that upcoming Flash intro pages (that you might skip in best case) followed by links like “Band”, “Members”, “Sound”, “Guest Book”, “Imprint”, the complete design held dark-colored. You can find that scheme for every bl**dy band, even for the most wanted.

“Band” and “Members” usually are rarely updated, “Sound” is mostly illegally implemented and “Imprint” seems to be a German legal invitation against common sense in most cases. The only interactive part seems to be the “Guest Book” where you may find stuff like saw you yesterday and really appreciated it, if you are lucky.

Ages ago, Verena brought up the idea of heaving a weblog for a band homepage instead:

• Post your upcoming events like On this and that date, we will have our next gig at [location]. We are very proud to perform there again because [reason]. The plugin “Upcoming Events” additionally delivers an event calendar as a widget to your site bar. The interesting thing, especially for band who don’t perform every day / week is: Upcoming events will be listed and treated more like a topic then a calendar. The only thing you have to do is to define a custom field date and the value for it.
• Once your gig is done, publish a new post: Yesterday we performed at [location]. It was lots of fun, we liked you as audience, here are some pictures [3-4 pictures/videos].
• From now on, people might react with certain comments and fill up your specific event page with contents. Comparing to a guest book entry (the word itself sounds obsolete somehow) that method looks like really search machine relevant, doesn’t it?

For me, it looks like a real alternative. But talking to the band guys and musicians, I really found reservations: They do not even got what I was talking about! Most of them just know how to turn on a computer. Most feel like they have to have a website. Talking about interactivity and maybe weblogs is too much for them, even if you would explain how to update the website’s content, simply sending an e-mail. This would probably be the most suspect thing.

What to do?

1st step – server environment

Check if the basic server environment is the same as you had on the server before, especially for

• PHP-Version (some modules require PHP5 and higher)
• Database-Version (maybe important for your data import)
• special PHP modules (e.g. if you use permalinks, make sure mod_rewrite is activated and running)

If you feel like there is everything alright on the new server, you may want to go ahead.

2nd step – the database

• Export the WordPress database of your former server to a sql-file or to a compressed sql-file. You may either use a GUI tool like phpMyAdmin or the terminal.
• Import this (compressed) sql-file into the database on your server. Use the import function of your GUI tool to do so or the terminal if you are able to login with putty.
• Change the path settings: In the new database of your webserver, you shall find a table called wp-options. In option_id="2", option_name="siteurl" you will find the path settings you entered during the initial installation process

3rd step – the files

• Connect to your previous server via FTP and download the files of your WordPress document root.
• Upload this files to you new server.
• Using your FTP client, go to the new server’s WordPress document root and open the file wp-config.php. Adapt the new server’s database name, the database server (if needed, localhost is used mostly), the database user name and the database password.
• Check the permissions needed for proper work of your new system:
  - wp-config.php has to be set to 0644
  - for pucture uploads etc, /wp-content/uploads/ shall be writable (0755 or 0777)
  - for updates or automatic plugin installation, /wp-content/plugins/ and /wp-content/upgrades/ shall be writable (0755 or 0777)
• Take care: In Unix-World, e.g. if you are using any Linux or Mac (AFAIK with a FreeBSD under the hood), dotted files are not shown and not copied by default using your FTP client. So the .htaccess file which is important if you activated the so called “Permalinks” may be not transferred. Make sure it is on his place.
• Go to Admin -> Settings -> Permalinks. In case you activated this options, at the bottom of this page the current content of your .htaccess appears like it should be. Probably the value for your RewriteBase changed. Copy this content and overwrite the .htaccess on your server.

You are done! Congratulations hero!