philbertdog

Hmmm, it appears I spoke too soon. Got up this morning eager to learn Duplicator, and couldn’t find it in the WP interface.

First, triple checked that password protection of directory was off.

Tried to install again, got more errors.

Logged in via FTP and Duplicator files were there. I erased them all for a fresh start.

Tried installing again and got this:

==============
Installing Plugin from uploaded file: duplicator.1.3.30.zip
Unpacking the package…

Installing the plugin…

Could not copy file. /home/USER/public_html/DOMAIN.com/wp-content/plugins/duplicator/duplicator.php

Plugin installation failed.
================

I again erased all files, and again ran the installer, and again got the same error.

I have been able to install Participants Database without difficulty.

I have an account on another server, will trying installing there, and will report back.

Aha, I found the problem, in case it is useful to somebody else.

I had the entire WordPress directory password protected so that search engines wouldn’t begin indexing my test site. Once I removed the protection installation and activation went smoothly. I’ll now begin exploring the software. Thanks for it! Looks very useful.

Ok, I now see how to download backups to my computer. Looks like a learn by doing situation. Ok, I’ll close thread and work on that.

I’ve installed and activated Updraft and see you have a nice built-in help intro. Nice.

I had in mind downloading backups to my personal computer. I don’t see that option yet. Can you advise? Thanks!

Thanks much Steve, that’s the start I need.

I didn’t know I could turn off image CDN in jetpack, so perhaps I’ll give that another look. I did try to install it a few days ago and the installer threw up an error I didn’t understand. Something about file size limitations php.ini I think.

So I investigated Jetpack in more detail and decided that, for now at least, I don’t want to install it. For one thing, it seems WP.com is intent on hosting everyone’s images. That’s one of the things I’m trying to get away from by self hosting.

It seems I need a more basic education on shortcodes. Are they built in to WordPress? Do I need to install a plugin? I’ve searched this site, but that brings up a zillion posts with specific detailed questions, and I need a general introduction to shortcodes at this point. What’s the general procedure for taking control of one’s shortcodes in a self hosted environment? Links to relevant articles most appreciated.

Thanks!

Thanks for clarifying that, very helpful. Ok, I’ll let this one go and move on. Happy to have arrived at a clear decision.

Sorry, please ignore and/or delete this thread. Being answered elsewhere. Thanks.

Thank you for your reply.

If I understand, I have to sign up for billing with Google, even though I’ll likely never reach the limit. I have very little faith in Google’s implementation of these services and so will not be giving them any billing information.

Does that kill this for me? Should I walk away now and move on to something else?

Thanks much for your good intentions and free service!

So I tried again. Still stumped, nothing works.

Best I can tell Maps is the issue, as it can’t find any address I enter. Here’s the page where I’m testing if that helps:

https://tanny.com/dbtest/

Your docs said, “5. IMPORTANT: Make sure you agree to their billing agreement or your key will not work.”

I can’t find anything about a billing agreement anywhere in Google’s interface. Can you provide further guidance?

I’ve enabled civics, and have both keys inserted in your interface.

If there is no matching ID, the ID value in the CSV is discarded, the record is imported and the ID for the record is automatically generated by the database using its internal counter.

Thank you, this is great. For my purposes I don’t need to be concerned with record IDs, so that just makes things even easier.

Got it working, awesome feature, thanks for it. Going to spare me many hours of drudgery.

Thanks for your comments HJ, appreciate it. My guess is as follows…

The vast majority of blogs have very little traffic. Creating content is relatively easy compared to marketing and building the audience. Most people seem happy to just see their content on the Net, and if they’re not, they typically give up before they have a significant audience. I’ve done this too many times to count myself. I can say from much experience that small traffic sites seem to work fine with their data stored in text files. That was my experience anyway.

A relatively small number of sites have most of the traffic. So if mySQL is more powerful than text files as a storage medium that would perhaps be the tool of choice for these high traffic sites. Again, this is my guessing.

There may well be other benefits to mySQL which I don’t know enough about to even mention. The entire web seems to have gone over to mySQL/php, and there must be some reason for that.

On a related subject, what I learned from about a decade of coding web projects in Perl is that there’s no point in writing the first line of code unless you’re doing it for fun, or know exactly how you’re going to connect with your market. Like most webmasters I put the marketing off until the end of the project, and lived to regret that newbie error.

I read once that real software companies spend about 85% of their time on planning, and only 15% on the coding. Don’t know if that’s true, but sounds about right.

Aha, I get it now thanks. I don’t have to worry about formatting because if I get close your code formats it correctly for me. If I type something not like a data in a date field it gets discarded. And, once I get a valid date in that field I can sort by it. Excellent, just what I was looking for.

Thank you again. Ok, this is the next thing I need to learn about WordPress. I’m doing all this in a test account so I’ll practice killing the test site and restoring it from backups.