OK – gather round.
This discussion is PRIMARILY for the GEEKS, but not exclusively. Non-geeks are welcome to comment, but I ask that you keep your comments 100% on topic – the features, functions, content and security of the new website. Our migration per se – not the long train of abuses which led to it.
This discussion will get long, and I don’t want to sort through ANY news about the election, The Steal, etc. Words of encouragement, prayer, blessing and spiritual protection are welcome, but keep them lean and mean.
This thread is 100% business.
If you’ve made prior comments on tech on other threads, that you feel are still relevant, feel free to REPOST THEM HERE. I don’t have time to do this myself.
NOW – down to business.
I have obviously rescinded my prior request that we not upload new header images – and as the first to violate that request, I invite other authors to follow suit.
Not only that, I am going to let authors begin following Flep’s latest posts, and just post all their images in the site media bucket. We have 50% left. I think that gives us plenty of time to move the site.
I REPEAT. Authors no longer need to store their images elsewhere. Use this site’s media bucket, as much as you want. This applies to ALL images – header and non-header.
I will reimpose the moratorium on new pictures when we do the final transition to the new site – not before then.
This process will be longer than expected, so I’m giving up on a SHARP transition, in favor of a SMOOTH transition.
The header image I have used on this post is a screen capture of the new site, which is actually functional right now. Here is a bigger picture of the home page.
The new site is:
https://theqtree.com
Our new site is a WordPress site much like here, except none of YOU ALL are members yet, because I have not yet approved your first comments.
If you – as a currently approved commenter on this blog – want to spin the wheels, please feel free to visit, leave a comment, and let me approve it.
There are technical reasons why I’m limiting this to currently approved posters for the moment.
I am not guaranteeing that this test site will remain, but we will see. I am hoping that what I have there now is sufficient. Obviously I haven’t even modified the “Sample Page” stuff in the corner, but no biggie.
Don’t leave any “essential information of historical import” on the new site – it may not be saved. Better to leave it on THIS THREAD, which will be saved if at all possible.
Our current theme here is called Independent Publisher 2. I ended up using this theme for The U Tree, too, because it is a great theme and people HERE love it. Sadly, that theme was “deprecated” even back then, and now it appears to be GONE from what is available to me on our new host, which is very close to or exactly “latest version” WordPress.
Instead, the new site is currently using something called Draftly.
We will deal with THEME stuff later. Right now, we need to get MIGRATION and IMPORT to work.
It is important to understand that a WordPress administrator on WordPress.com is only an ADMIN inside the WordPress framework. On this site, I have NO POWERS outside the WordPress API. I can even delete the site, as part of the API, and I can create new sites, but I have no powers outside what WordPress.com allocates to me though THEIR IMPLEMENTATION of the WordPress software.
Now – that is still a LOT of power, but it gives me only one choice in terms of exporting the old website.
Exporting our site from WordPress.com creates XML files of data – in our case an astounding 1.5 GB of XML data, broken into 8 huge XML files, between 67 MB and 388 MB. All of this was received in a ZIP archive of about 167 MB.
Note that the unpacked XML data is about the same size as our media bucket – roughly 1.5 GB.
The exported XML files include a lot of private data from our users – they will not be shared. HOWEVER, the beginning of the first one is interesting:
I am still working on importing this data via the new WordPress API – which is not exactly as described in the XML above. Things are thus not working exactly as specified in the XML above. I will be more specific in comments below – it’s an active mess.
BUT – bottom line – we have a new site up, and it will be wickedly hard for us to be deplatformed from it. Our first boats are on the shore of the New World.
Say a prayer of thanks!
W
