As I mentioned Thursday, I planned on completely deleting my Wordpress installation and database in order to start fresh and hopefully correct a few elusive bugs I was having trouble tracking down.

I didn’t have any trouble deleting the files and database Saturday afternoon. Restoring everything has been a bit more work though.

Before deleting, I was sure to back everything up. I downloaded my site’s entire directory via FTP and also completed a database backup by a couple of methods. The first is using the Wordpress Database Backup plugin and the second was through phpMyAdmin.

I decided to use both methods just in case something strange happened during the restoration process. I also used the export to XML option that is commonly used to export Wordpress data to other blogging platforms but can be used to restore data as well.

I ended up using the Wordpress XML option to restore my data rather than the database backup files because I knew that many my database information would contain extra stuff from old plugins that I didn’t want to have in my fresh installation. The importation of the XML file was as simple as browsing to the correct file location and hitting an upload button.

All of my posts, comments, and categories came back. Unfortunately, the categories were no longer tied to individual post. So, I’ve spent the better part of my afternoon after returning from Church re-assigning categories to post. Rather than be upset about this or try a work around using one of my database backups, I look at this as an opportunity to greatly improve the organizational structure of my site.

Having been blogging for some time now, I have a better idea of what categories fit my site. I also like the fact that my categories will be more consistent across all of my post and better planned out. Rather than keeping all of my old categories, I decided to create some new ones and get rid of some lesser used ones. During this process, I looked at a few sites I admire and which cover similar topics as mine to see what categories they had come up with.

One of the sites I looked at during this process was cdharrison.com. I mention Chris’s site because he gave me the brilliant idea of using the sub-category feature built-in to Wordpress. So, now I can assign broad categories like Web Development and sub-categories like Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, etc.

You may also notice that I’m no longer using a tag based system (e.g., Ultimate Tag Warrior 3) to supplement my categories and support once fancy AJAX archive page. I decided that tagging a bit redundant and confusing. I believe it also slowed down the page loads of my site. Not to mention tagging was one of the things I was having problems with in my old install.

Right now, I’m about half-way through re-assigning categories to post but I think you should already be able to tell a big difference in organization by just looking at the categories in my sidebar.

I should also mention that a few of the imported posts had didn’t import correctly. I’m fairly certain it’s because I used the XML file rather than restored my database. The one common thread I’ve noticed on the corrupted imported post is that they have a lot of words with an apostrophe in them. I believe the quote nesting got messed up during the export and caused Wordpress to get confused about where some post entries ended.

Oh well, I’ve been correcting these as I find them by going back to my database backup file and searching for the corrupted post. Fortunately, the database backup has all of the info I need though I have to remove some special characters that the database uses to track line returns, etc. I also have to remove the spots where words with apostrophes in them have been escaped. So, please forgive me if I’ve missed some and you find words that look like “it’’s.”

Also, please let me know if you find any posts that look like they didn’t import correctly or if you see anything else that doesn’t seem right. One thing I know I need to work on is the Archive page because its basically blank since I opted not to re-use the K2 Live Archives.