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Wordpress migration -- permalinks don't find files


I have a blog (www.billoblog.com/wordpress) that I am trying to migrate to a new vps at www.forensicpath.us/wordpress. I managed to get the wordpress directory moved and changed the config file to point to forensicpath.us. I then moved the database over and got some odd behavior.

At first, the blog's front page came up fine, but when I clicked on one of the posts, it linked to the post on the old blog site (which is still up). Aha! I said. I gotta change the permalinks. So, I went to the sql file I had moved across and, using vim, did a global change of billoblog.com to forensicpath.us.

Now, when I click on a post, it shows the permalink I want to see, e.g. https://www.forensicpath.us/wordpress/index.php/2024/09/19/pathology-cases-agenesis-of-the-corpus-callosum/ instead of https://www.billoblog.com/wordpress/index.php/2024/09/19/pathology-cases-agenesis-of-the-corpus-callosum/ but now I get 404 page not found.

Interestingly, I can edit the pages -- when I go into Dashboard -> Posts -> Edit post, the correct information shows up. I don't know if it's pulled locally or reaching back to billoblog.com or what.

Obviously, manually editing the sql backup file was probably not the brightest thing to do, but I don't know how to update the permalinks and the data the permalinks should point to. I'm stumped.


Solution

  • Thanks for the responses, and all were close to right. There were multiple problems:

    1. The old site was using PHP v 7.7, which was way obsolete (and was one of the reasons that I was migrating -- my old hosting provider would not upgrade my CenOS 7 vps but instead bought a long term third party support contract). This meant that a number of my plugins would not work when I moved to my new vps running Ubuntu 24 with php 8.3. Things broke.

    2. The character encoding was also obsolete.

    3. There was a problem with indexing some of my tables. On migration, the mysql index key was over the length limit.

    I threw up my hands, broke down, and bought Duplicator Pro. It seemed to ram things through, though it coughed on the key limit thing. It deactivated my plugins, which I then upgraded when the site came back up. The site seems to be working, though I'm a bit concerned about the fact that one of the tables seems to be missing. I guess I'll find out if it's a deal-breaker.

    In any case, I appreciate the responses. I think that the better-search-and-replace would be a better option than vim for changing the permalinks...