The ‘All-in-One WP Migration’ plugin is all you need to migrate your WordPress blog

This blog has just been migrated to a newer and (much) faster host node running Proxmox 5 with ZFS.

Therefore, I was looking for the best method to migrate a WordPress blog to another server (and/or database and/or directory and/or URL).

Do you remember the times when migrating a WordPress blog was rather tedious, involving many manual steps, despite (other) handy tools like WP-CLI? Apparently, this is no longer needed, as all you need is the following plugin:

All-in-One WP Migration

This plugin’s export and import functionality takes care of all the required configuration and path adjustments, allowing you to easily migrate a blog with up to 512 MB data. The steps are thus:

  1. Install the All-in-One WP Migration plugin on your current WordPress site
  2. Use the plugin to export all your data, plugins, themes, configuration etc., e.g. as a downloadable file.
    Note: In particularly tricky cases you can also manually replace certain strings in the db or exclude specific data and files.
  3. Setup a new vanilla WordPress installation at another location (server, directory). You’ll need a database and the WP installation files for this.
  4. Install the All-in-One WP Migration plugin on your new WordPress site
  5. Use the plugin on your new site to import the previously exported data from your old site

It’s hard to believe, but that’s really it!

Delete duplicate e-mail messages

If you need to delete duplicate e-mail messages on an IMAP server, take a look at this useful IMAP de-duplicator script:

IMAP de-duplicator – IMAPdedup

As IMAPdedup is a command line interface tool (a python script), it’s particularly useful for:

  • automated deletion of duplicates (as it can be called from other scripts)
  • extraordinarily big mailboxes or if you have many subfolders (as there’s no intervention by the user required)
  • if you have console/shell access to the IMAP server (as you can then run the script on the server itself, speeding the de-duplication process further up)

I also found that it deals relatively well with failures (e.g. when a folder is read-only and hence messages can’t be deleted): It simply reports them on the screen and carries on.

Here’s a quick’n’dirty bash script to de-dup the inbox and all subfolders of the specified account:

#!/bin/sh
# Delete all duplicate messages in all folders of said account.
# Note that we connect through SSL (-x) to the default port.

SERVER="my.server.com"
USER="mylogin"
PASS="mypass"

for folder in `imapdedup.py -s $SERVER -x -u $USER -w $PASS -l`;
do
 imapdedup.py -s $SERVER -x -u $USER -w $PASS $folder
done

If you only have to de-duplicate messages in a small folder, you could also use the following de-duplication add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird:

Remove Duplicate Messages Add-on for Thunderbird

Note however that the ‘Remove Duplicate Messages’ add-on is intended for interactive use only, not for batch processing. I also noticed that it fails at cleaning big mail folders (e.g. containing 50’000 messages).