Part of the project I am on involves moving the entire WordPress site from our internal data center to an Amazon EC2 zone. Backup Buddy was recommended by a consultant that we are working with and I tested it against a Go Daddy account first.

Well, let’s same this is a fantastic plugin, I backed up the entire site (database and files) and moved the ZIP file as well as the importbuddy.php file to the root of the new server.

Navigating to importbuddy.php walks you through a very easy wizard that will setup a migration from one server to another, changing all links to reflect the new domain.

I will be running some more tests today and will plan on a real case to EC2 tomorrow, so far it looks like this task will be a breeze with Backup Buddy!

Click here for more information about Backup Buddy.

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Well, let me start by saying that my background has always been in Microsoft technologies (VB, C#, ASP.NET SQL Server, etc). But, I have used others such as Java, Oracle, Sybase, PHP and MySQL; this has always been a strong point of my background that I can easily switch between environments.

A recent project at work pushed my hand to learn WordPress and like I usually do I jumped in full force. I wanted to take this time to provide my feedback on working with WordPress.I had to develop a custom plugin as well as learn to configure and add on to the WordPress site. Basically, I had to learn to to control it and manage the WordPress site once our consultants left. Our consults handled the design of the theme and offered a little development help. They offered more information on general WordPress functionality

I felt that developing a plugin for WordPress was very easy, working the the PHP code took a little be remember the syntax and find any changes from the last time I worked with PHP. But that didn’t take too long to. Understanding the “The Loop” was a major part of plugins as well as attaching to the correct events. Once I put a very basic plugin in place I made the plugin usable with a shortcode that was placed on a page. I then added a custom admin screen for managing the settings, which included importing data from a CSV file and working with data in custom tables. Once that was complete I had to modify the user profile screen to add a few custom fields that would interact with my custom tables, this took a little to understand but it came through and worked out great.

Configuring WordPress was a breeze, modifying settings and installing plugins (which there are a huge variety of) was simple.

In my opinion WordPress is a great environment for blogging and building a site upon for just about anyone. I don’t have to be involved in editing pages and update pages. This can be handled by our business and marketing people, while my development team concentrates on development of products.

I will post more details on the development of the plugin and and using WordPress in future posts.