forrest.tanaka

Hey, I just wanted to take a moment to give a big thanks to all of you who tried to help. So strange this problem’s so stubborn. In the end, I decided to go with a standard WordPress export and import, and then patching things up afterwards, and it’s been pretty reasonable. But you guys put so much time into my problem that I wanted you all to know I really appreciate it.

Is there a way to do that privately on this forum, or do I have to post it right in this thread?

Thanks for the suggestion! I removed the &reauth=1 from the URL, hit return, attempted to log in, and it reloads the same login screen with the same URL, including the &reauth=1 at the end.

I set the permalinks in the test site to be the default (page number style), reexported the database and files, uploaded the WordPress files to the destination site, replaced all the test site’s domain names with the destination site in the .sql file, changed wp-config.php to connect to the new database, and it resulted in exactly the same failure — visiting the site is fine, attempting to log in as admin just gets me the login screen again.

I’m using phpMyAdmin for both the export and the import. I’m not familiar with MySQL Tools / Workbench.

SHOW ENGINES; in both the test site and destination site show MyISAM as the default, and all tables in the database are listed as MyISAM. I didn’t think about checking that.

The old site is a first.first.com kind of sub-domain. So I replaced all first.first.com with second.com.

Neither the test site nor the destination use multi-site. I had the permalinks of the test site set to year/month/name. I like that idea — changing that setting and re-doing the process. I will try that right now, though the upload speed to the destination server is pretty abysmal; it’ll take a while. Thank you! I hope that’ll work.

Yup; I did precisely that: I replaced all 3300+ occurrences of the test site’s domain name with the destination site’s domain name in the .sql file from the test site before importing it to the destination site.

I copied the entire site files from the test site and uploaded them to the root of the destination site, then exported the entire MySQL database from the test site, changed all the occurrences of the test site domain names to the destination domain name in the .sql file, and then imported it to the destination MySQL database, changed wp-config.php to have the destination MySQL information (I get no database connection error message, and the site works perfectly for visitors).

I searched through the entire .sql file after my modifications and the test site’s domain name is eradicated; all replaced by the destination domain name.

The tutorial claims it works, I actually made it work, just to a different host.

EDIT: to a different test host, I mean.

EDIT 2: I just saw your new reply. Yes, I did that, though instead of making the new database name the same as the old (the destination server forces a prefix to the name), I modified wp-config.php to have the new database’s information. I get no database connection errors.

As a bit more information, I just did a fresh, empty install of WordPress on the destination server, and I can log in to the dashboard just fine. So now my WordPress site transfer skills are suspect, though I did do it once before for the same site, just a different destination, and today I followed the tutorial step by step to be sure I didn’t mess anything up. I did change the over 3000 occurrences of the test site domain name in the MySQL database dump to the destination domain name, and the site worked perfectly for visitors; there just wasn’t a way to get to the dashboard.

The test server and the final server have totally different host names, and they’ve both been around for more than a year. I’m actually replacing the files of an existing site.

I tried logging in with the shared host’s IP address, my username, and wp-admin, I get the same result — no error, but it just reloads the login page.

The tutorial said exactly that: dump the database, all the WordPress files, and restore them on the new site. It worked perfectly for me once with the same WordPress site, but on a different destination host.

Thanks for replying!

Ah, I forgot to mention that in my list. Yes, and plus I have enough browsers and machines here that I keep trying them on combinations that have never seen the site before, and I can’t log in with any of them.

Thank you, but it sadly made no difference. I renamed .htaccess to hta (no dot) and I still couldn’t log into the dashboard on two different machines.

I forgot to mention that I tested figaro’s procedure by transferring a site from my test server to my local computer running MAMP, and it worked flawlessly — it displayed and word perfectly, and I could log into the dashboard.