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496 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Figure 18-5. Restoring WordPress database backup using phpMyAdmin Note that the file upload method can accept gzipped compressed files. This is perfect if you ve followed my recommendation and used the WP-DB Backup plug-in, which generates such a compressed file type. To restore your backup, upload the latest archive file generated by the WP-DB Backup plug-in and click the Go button. You will eventually (this can take up to a few minutes) be presented with a page containing a message similar to the one in Figure 18-6, indicating that the upload was successful. Figure 18-6. Successful WordPress database restore using phpMyAdmin Check your blog site now to determine that all is well. Sometimes, a faulty theme can display a blank page at this stage. If so, swap out the theme to the Default theme (see Chapter 16) to see if that solves the problem. If that fails to resolve the situation, you may need to resort to reapplying a new set of WordPress files, but that is a rare event. Monitoring Storage Space and Bandwidth To keep your WordPress blog healthy, you need to be conscious of any limits imposed by your hosting company, because your blog is dynamic it grows whenever people add comments or when you write new articles. The following are three limits you need to consider.
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 495 Tip If you re moving your WordPress blog to a new hosting provider, you ll need to first create the database as you did in Chapter 14. To make things easy for yourself, name the database exactly as in your previous installation. Navigate your web browser to the phpMyAdmin page for your database. It should look similar to Figure 18-4, which shows the WordPress tables. Figure 18-4. The WordPress database tables in phpMyAdmin Choose the SQL tab at the top of the page, and you will see a page like the one shown in Figure 18-5. Here, you can enter a query in the large text area in the top part of the page or choose a text file to upload by clicking the Choose button next to the Location of the textfile box. Notice that there is a maximum file size indicated, which is 8MB in the example shown in Figure 18-5. Your limit may differ from this, but the general rule is that uploading files of around 3MB and above usually proves unsuccessful. In this event, you re forced to cut segments from the text file to paste into the text area of the SQL tab, one piece at a time, until the whole file has been completed. Note Prior to populating the WordPress databases with your backup, you ll need to ensure that all the current information in there is removed by using the DROP TABLE command in MySQL. The process used by the WP-DB Backup plug-in does this for you when restoring the backup.
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494 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Figure 18-3. The WP-Cron extension adds a Scheduled Backup section to the WP-DB Backup page. So, with a couple of great plug-ins and a few clicks, you ve managed to accomplish your goal of achieving the magical triumvirate of a good backup strategy: easy to do, with little human interaction, and performed regularly. Give yourself a pat on the back(up)! Restoring Your Database Okay, so you re here because something catastrophic has gone wrong and you need to restore your backup. Or you could be moving your blog to a different hosting provider. Or perhaps you are one of those people who like to prepare for the worst. In any case, you re interested in the process of restoring your database from a backup. Caution Please understand that even if you ve been generating backups, you won t be able to retrieve the information lost since the last backup. First, let s take a look at the recipe for restoring databases. At the top of the list is an archive file generated by any of the methods: the WP-DB Backup plug-in, the graphical user interfaces of either phpMyAdmin or MySQL Administrator, or from the command line. Without the archive file, you can t achieve much. Note If you came here looking for help with a damaged database but haven t performed a backup, then you should consider searching through and perhaps posting to the WordPress support forums at http:// wordpress.org/support/. Although Skippy.net s WP-DB Backup plug-in makes it easy for you to generate backups and automate unattended backups, there is no companion restore plug-in or option. This is because there doesn t need to be. Restoring is a simple process of applying the generated archive file to the database, which you can do using the phpMyAdmin interface.
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 493 Take notice of the security warning contained in the documentation for Skippy.net s WordPress database backup plug-in and don t store your backups on the server for any length of time. This is because the backup files contain sensitive information about your blog. Don t let them be seen by unscrupulous people. Keep your backup files not only safe, but secure. Using the WP-Cron Plug-In for Regular Unattended Backups Recall the core directives of a good backup strategy: backups must be easy to do, rely as little on human interaction as possible, and be performed regularly. The WP-DB Backup plug-in certainly makes backups easy. Now I m going to introduce to you another useful plug-in from the same author that will take care of the other two backup strategy requirements. This next plug-in is WP-Cron, which takes its name from the UNIX command that executes jobs at a specific time and or date, either once or at regular intervals. You can download WP-Cron from Skippy.net s web site at http://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/ plugins/wp-cron/. By itself, the WP-Cron plug-in doesn t do much, but when combined with WP-DB Backup, it enables unattended backups of your WordPress database. Tip WordPress Codex strongly recommends blog administrators to back up their databases at regular intervals and before upgrades. You should take this advice! Unattended how does that work? The WP-Cron plug-in doesn t install anything on the web server, or configure a cron job that the underlying operating system (such as Linux or Windows Server 2003) runs. In fact, a lot of hosting providers wouldn t allow you to do that. Instead, this plug-in relies entirely on someone or something visiting your site, which is a fairly safe bet these days, with the number of search engine crawlers, TrackBacks, and Pingbacks interoperating with your site however unpopular it may be! Any time a page on your site is requested, it triggers the plug-in. If a preconfigured interval has elapsed, the task will be executed. In this case, at approximately the same time every day, an unattended backup will be generated and e-mailed to you. Download the WP-Cron plug-in from Skippy.net s web site at http://www.skippy.net/ blog/category/wordpress/plugins/wp-cron/. By now, you know how to install a WordPress plug-in: unpack the zipped file to your local drive, upload the single file wp-cron.php to the wp-content/plugins folder, and then go to the Plugins page and activate the WP-Cron plug-in. You now need to configure unattended backups, because they re not enabled by default. Thankfully, this is no more complex than specifying an e-mail address for your backup archive file delivery. Return to the Manage page and again choose the tab labeled Backup. Scroll down the page, and you ll notice an extra section at the foot of the page, as shown in Figure 18-3. As with the attended backup (the one requiring you to click the Backup! button), you can also archive non-WordPress database tables that are present in the same database. To configure unattended backups, select the Daily check box, enter your chosen archiving e-mail address, and click the Submit button.
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492 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Figure 18-2. The WP DB-Backup progress page The progress bar indicates how far along the backup is. Please do follow the instructions on this page, which tell you not to touch anything, as the backup will fail otherwise. Note that until you have a lot of information on your blog to back up, the procedure will likely take only a few seconds. The file that is generated and automatically downloaded is a compressed file containing a single .sql file of MySQL instructions. The size of the .sql file depends on the amount of information stored on your blog. Once you have a few hundred blog posts and a few thousand comments, the download file can become quite large. Thankfully, because it is text, it compresses to a manageable size for downloading, storing on your web server, or possibly being e-mailed to you. Given that there are e-mail providers giving away 2GB of storage space for free these days, you could even set up an account purely to receive and store your blog backups. Note Usually, backup experts advise against storing backups in compressed form, mainly because if any part of the file becomes corrupt, the whole archive is rendered unusable. However, the use of compression in this instance is appropriate, considering if any part of the single MySQL instruction file contained in the compressed gzip file becomes corrupt, the whole archive should be discarded anyway. This is because of the overwhelmingly large proportion of database instructions compared with database information (your blog data). If one instruction is wrong, recovery is likely to fail catastrophically.
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 491 Figure 18-1. The standard WP DB-Backup page WP-DB Backup lists all the tables it can find in the database. Here, you can see it lists both the WordPress tables and the phpBB tables that happened to be installed in the same database. The plug-in automatically selects all the standard WordPress tables and provides check boxes to allow you to include any other tables with the backup. For now, leave the default backup option to download to your computer selected and click the Backup! button. If all goes well (and there s no reason why it shouldn t), you should see the Backup Progress page, as shown in Figure 18-2.
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490 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Note Instructions for backing up WordPress databases using graphical interfaces such as phpMyAdmin, MySQL Administrator, and the command-line interface to MySQL are available on the WordPress Codex at http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database. Making Backups with the WP-DB Backup Plug-In The WP-DB Backup plug-in provides an easy-to-use interface for backing up your database tables. With just a few clicks, you can back up all of your WordPress tables. Installing and Activating the Plug-In Point your web browser at http://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/plugins/ wp-db-backup/ and download the WP-DB Backup plug-in from Skippy.net. At the time of writing, it s currently at version 1.7 and mature in development. Unpack the zipped file to your local drive. It contains four files. Depending on your primary language, you ll probably be interested in only two of them: wp-db-backup.php and wp-dp-backup.txt. The former is the plug-in, and the latter contains the documentation for the plug-in. The other two files are for language localization. Installation and configuration are simple. All you need to do is create a directory, upload the plug-in, and then activate it. On the web server, navigate to the wp-contentfolder. Create a directory here named backup and make it writable by the web server process. This normally involves setting the properties by right-clicking the directory in the FTP window, or by providing the instruction chmod g+w backup at the shell command line. If configured to store the generated backups on the web site, this directory is where the plug-in will store them, which is why it needs to be writable by the web server. However, by default, the plug-in will expect you to download the backups to your own local machine and not use this folder. Using a backupfolder is the most secure way to handle your backups and is the approach I recommend. Next, you need to upload the wp-db-backup.phpfile to the wp-content/pluginsfolder. Finally, go to the administration pages, click Plugins, scroll down until you reach the WordPress Database Backup plug-in, and click Activate in the right column. That s it! The plug-in is installed, configured, and activated. Backing Up WordPress Tables Navigate to WordPress s Manage page, where you ll notice a new tab labeled Backup. Select this tab, and you ll be presented with a page like the one shown in Figure 18-1.
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Maintaining Your Blog CHAPTER 1 8 You need to do some regular housekeeping if you are to maintain a working, active community web site. Some of those housekeeping tasks are standard things you should do for any kind of web site: making backups, checking your links, and so on. Some things are WordPressspecific, and some of them are specific to maintaining your readers interest. None of these maintenance tasks are particularly daunting, and most of them should occupy no more than a few hours a week. Your biggest maintenance time should be spent feeding your blog: responding to comments, writing new posts, and adding links. In this chapter, I will show you how to look after your blog, beginning with the most important maintenance task: backing up your database. Backing Up and Restoring Your Database Why should I make a backup? you may ask yourself. The answer can be found by imagining having to ask yourself Why didn t I make a backup? when it all goes wrong. You never want to be in the situation where you regret not making a backup. The procrastinator in us will put off generating a backup countless times until it s too late. And that s just the one backup, not an ongoing weekly regime. Those of you who have been on the receiving end of a disk crash, a software update that went wrong, or even an Internet service provider going out of business will have learned the hard way, by having your whole cyber-existence wiped out seemingly at the touch of a button. Never again will you let yourself be placed in such a disastrous situation. It has happened to me more than once. Now I think hard about a disaster recovery plan even before I start on a new project. Even as I write this chapter, I find myself pressing Ctrl+S to save the document at the end of each line. The primary considerations of a good backup strategy are that a backup should be easy to do, should rely as little on human interaction as possible (hence making it easy), and should be performed regularly. Oh, and of course, because there isn t much point in generating a lot of backups without being able to restore them when something does go wrong, a good backup strategy is only as good as its recovery plan. You have a few choices when deciding how to back up WordPress databases. You can use phpMyAdmin or the MySQL Administrator application, which you may have used to create the databases. You can use the command-line interface to MySQL if you have remote access to your server. Finally, you can use the WordPress backup plug-in from Skippy.net, which is the approach I ll describe here.
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CHAPTER 17 CUSTOMIZING YOUR BLOG S LAYOUT 487 sophisticated than a simple blog. You can download the completed version of the theme from the Apress web site as c3rohorses-learning-layout.zip. Other Layouts You can do a lot more with WordPress. Here are some suggestions for other layouts: For a review site, you might include affiliate links on your articles or sidebars. Plug-ins are available to help you manage those links. One example is AdRotator by Angsuman Chakraborty (http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/ wordpress-plugin-adrotator-rotate-your-ads-including-adsense-dynamically/). For a site that has a number of authors producing articles, you can use plug-ins that allow you to list posts just by a particular author. For example, Customizable Post Listings (http://www.coffee2code.com/archives/2004/08/27/ plugin-customizable-post-listings/) is another useful plug-in by Scott Reilly, who wrote the Customizable Comment Listings plug-in introduced in Chapter 16. It might make sense to use the excerpt on your main page instead of the whole content or the post teaser. You can also find plug-ins that will allow your readers to vote on each article, giving your authors valuable feedback about what does and doesn t work. Chris J. Davies has a great voting plug-in, available from http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2004/11/30/ new-plugin/. Numerous photo and gallery plug-ins are available, too. Examples include IImage Gallery by Martin Chlup .c (http://fredfred.net/skriker/index.php/iimage-gallery) and FAlbum by Elijah Cornell (http://www.randombyte.net/blog/projects/falbum/), which uses photos stored on Flickr. A model-building or car-customizing community site could get immense value from these. If you are prepared to put a little thought into what your community wants and a little effort into giving it to them, WordPress can become the backbone of an online community. Aim to give the most to your community, and in turn, you will get the most back from it. Listen to your readers and your contributors, too. Don t jump at everything they ask, but consider their complaints, their praise, and their suggestions with equal value. Summary In this chapter, you ve seen how you can tailor WordPress to better fit the needs of your community readers. I have given you some ideas about how to anticipate your readers expectations and how to help them get a better experience from your site. These things are essential if you are to have a successful online community site and keep your visitors coming back for more. In the next chapter, I will cover some essential maintenance practices that will keep your blog running smoothly for years.
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486 CHAPTER 17 CUSTOMIZING YOUR BLOG S LAYOUT Figure 17-23. Link category administration A Limited Main Page Sidebar The last change for this layout is related to the main page. Now that you have added a list of links in another category, a problem has emerged on the main blog page. Sidebar A uses the template tag get_links_list. This tag outputs a header and a list of links for each of the link categories you have created in Link Manager. This is great for normal use and when you have a small list of links in each category. However, in a learning scenario, you may want links for each category to show up only on a page showing an article in that category. On the front page, or any page that uses sidebar A, you want only the default Blogroll category to be displayed. Listing 17-17 shows the simple change to sidebar-a.php to accomplish this. Listing 17-17. Only List Category 1 in sidebar-a.php

Although the changes for the learning layout have been relatively complicated, the results are worth the effort. You can apply these same techniques to a real-world blog. Take another look at Figure 17-18. It shows that WordPress can be used to power a site that is much more
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