File names and locations?

  • Hello:

    Sorry that these are such elementary questions but I need to find out the file locations and names of WP files. My friend passed away and he was hosting WP sites on an Apple Xserve running centOS. I need to get the clients their files so they can get the sites elsewhere for hosting. I’m not able to get the web server to start so that I could back them up. I can poke around in terminal enough to get in a lot of trouble and have not been able to find any files that look like HTML etc. Can anyone please point me in the right direction as to were I might find these files and the standard file names and extensions for a WP Web site. Thank You very much.

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  • WordPress is software that stores the user’s content in a database. It handles the access, read, and writes to the database. The theme generates the pages of HTML that the site visitor sees, filled with the content from the database. Plugins add functionality.

    So you won’t find any files of HTML for the client’s sites. What you need is to get the databases dumped to files so they can be loaded somewhere else. Or get the server running so a plugin could take a capture of the HTML generated for each page, but that’s not that useful for a client, because the interactive parts(forms like comments) would be non-functional.

    Thread Starter rhegyi

    (@rhegyi)

    Thanks Joy. So there is no way of finding the database and coping that to another server running WP?

    That’s a bummer….I guess my only hope would be to try to get the Apache server running.

    Thank You for your response.

    Rick

    Yes, each site will have a wp-config.php file which will contain the DB name and login credentials. You should be able to access the DB using that. However, it may be easier to grab a plugin that is designed for backup/migration and use that so each website owner can export their own data. Look at the Jetpack plugin:

    Jetpack Backup and Migration

    So there is no way of finding the database and coping that to another server running WP?

    I didn’t say that. I said to dump it, so it could be loaded elsewhere. You typically don’t move a database by moving the root-owned file.
    Each WP installation has a wp-content folder that you should copy. It contains the uploaded images, the themes, and the plugins. The options and which ones are active are all stored in the database.

    Thread Starter rhegyi

    (@rhegyi)

    Ok Sorry, misunderstood. Thank You.

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