‘Deactivating’ Old Blogs?

  • Hi all,

    Say you have a WP blog that’s old, but with content you still want to leave online, but will never access again, like from a school project. We’re doing more and more with WP blogs at my school, and I’ve got a large collection of dormant ones. Every time a new release comes out, I have a whole bunch to upgrade, even some that have not been used for many months.

    Is there a way to securely ‘deactivate’ the blog so that it will still be ‘browsable’ by visitors (no logins) but won’t require application of future upgrades?

    The ideal solution would be something easily reversible.

    TIA,

    -kj-

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Here a couple of possibilites:
    1. Don’t do anything–just let those blogs sit there.
    2. Change the admin password and email address on each blog so no one but yourself can login. If there are other users on each blog guess you might even need to delete them, or again change the password and email address on those accounts.
    3. Look at something like WordPress MU
    4. Consider Brian’s Upgrade WordPress in 5 seconds script: https://www.thecodecave.com/article315

    Thread Starter kjarrett

    (@kjarrett)

    Thanks Michael. I can easily lock out the blogs but I guess the question I have really relates more to security vulnerabilities. I’m fine with leaving the blogs as is as long as doing so doesn’t leave code out there that can be exploited. We’ve got several 2.0x blogs out there and I’m just now migrating our active ones to 2.1. I saw Brian’s script and it scared me a bit. I guess I should play with it in a test instance and see how it works with my host. Thanks again. -kj-

    You might find it worthwhile using httrack if you’re after long-term storage, and don’t want to worry about versions of WordPress, PHP, MySQL, etc. Basically, it’ll download a complete mirror of the URL you specify and all pages beneath it; it’ll also grab the images, and adjust URLs if necessary to make sure they all work wherever you re-upload it — you just let the program run for a while and download everything it can. I did it to my old blog versions here:

    https://archived.ryanjohnwilliams.com/v1.ryansgoblog.com/
    https://archived.ryanjohnwilliams.com/v2.ryansgoblog.com/

    As you can see they look like perfectly functional websites and are preserved perfectly, however they’re completely portable and can be reuploaded anywhere as it’s all static HTML; as a result, anything dynamic on the blog such as posting new comments will no longer work.

    Oh, you can get it here: https://www.httrack.com/

    If anyone has a better website mirroring tool that isn’t wget (it struggled with images in style sheets), do leave a post. ??

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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