Whens the Right Time?: The Transfer from Local to Production

I’ve been working on my clockin plugin for some time, and have nearly completed most of the graphs and the basic functionality, but theres a couple of things that I still need to do. So It leaves to question, when is the right time?

graphs

Well, I think it I believe, at this point in time, its project based. What are absolute necessities? For example, Even though I have the graph bases, I still need to grab the github trees and append those to the graph. I need to add each post type, when its updated to “recent posts” so they are easily accessible. There are time difference bugs where a month will show the same times for a different day then a weekday. As well as Timezone problems, allowing for projects to have appended Bug fixes and Enhancements. Showing on author page, loading all previous data from all my various locations (I’ve been working a ton, and I want to show it off)

In essence, Top Shelfing User Experience.

Then theres the error checking which will allow me to post this to the plugins like; When github Authorization for a user is taken away. Caching the pictures to promote speed. When a wordpress user is deleted, what do I do? Making sure that the dates are SEO compatible as well as graphs. When a readme is blank, not displaying one.

In essence very important things that I am not worried about right now since they don’t necessarilly all apply to me

But as I look at my fixes and enhancements, I start realizing how intertwined the plugin and theme enhancements are. So Can I truelly submit this as a plugin? Or is this just neat idea for my own personal setup? As I continue, only more enhancements arise, so when does it end? Or do I see it as a continuous project? Is wordpress the best place for this? Could I be doing it better? These are important questions I think everyone may have, and I believe working hard from working smart.

Transfering My Old Stuff

One of the things I’m going to have to do is be able to look at my old project in order to incorperate things I especially liked into WordPress. Among them are my Clock In system, Fractals. Now This isn’t just a two step process since most of my experimental work is on the server (which is bad mkay [your [production site should never be your experimental area {but for every rule there are exceptions}]) as a result I have to do a few things….

  1. Setup a local server
  2. Import all my files into the server
  3. Import my SQL database into the server
  4. Do little things to make sure everything is in proper working condition

Setting Up my Local Server

Setting up a local server can be done in a few ways. As I’m on windows, things become like cake. I’ve also done this on linux, and for what its worth, there is plenty of documentation out there to do it. For my purposes, I like to avoid ISS. The reason for this is I found it previously to have a bad user interface. What I’ve enjoyed in the past is Xampp.

xampp

 

Its a simple Install, It works, and Easily accessible. Theres not much else you can ask for from a service, or anything really.

Now, I don’t want to turn this into a tutorial but more of a general description of my experience. Nonetheless, Due to the nature of this, Its going to be one and I’m aware of that.

Importing All My Files

Now, I already have Filezilla installed because its near the best ftp (file transfer protocol) experience I’ve had. but just for giggles I’ll show you another cute little trick

windows ftp

 

Whenever you have any folder open in windows, you can change the path to be “ftp://your-web-server” and you will have an easy to use method of accessing your webservers files. Now I am using filezilla currently, but I should be using a revision control system such as Mecurial, tortoise or even Github. I’ll definitely say I learned my lesson about version control over the last couple months.

If your going to be installing FileZilla like I’m using, remember to install the client version. The Server is quite literally for servers (I’ll go over that on another topic), its meant to be able to receive FTP calls, not make them. Servers are listeners not talkers.

After you’ve installed, got Xampp and FileZilla installed, We want to do a few things….

  1. Figure out what our hosts ip address is
  2. Create an FTP user so we can access our files
  3. Login

Our Ip address will be localhost.
There are other ways to figure it out like understanding what our ip address is to ourselves. but when it comes down to it, localhost is the clean and simple way.

Creating an FTP user
On the Xampp Panel, you want to click “admin” for the FileZilla Section

admin

From there we open up our admin menu and go to user accounts

fzadminThen we add our user

fzuseraccountsSimple as that

Back to our Filezilla client
filezilla

 

Up top, we want Localhost, Username, Password, Go!
You can also save, but I don’t need to worry about that right now.

From there I connected to my old server, dropped all my stuff in the htdocs folder of my local server, which is located directly under your xampp root.

Import my SQL database into the server

This is a pretty simple process. You’re going to want to go to your original sites SQL admin page. Go to export, save the text file. Then go to your local page go to import and choose the text file.

SQL Export

The File

import

Making Sure Things are working Properly

This changes from system to system. For me This is completely custom and as much as I’d love to show how the system works. More importantly I’d just like to get it overwith. see you tomarrow! 🙂