I am pretty much addicted to WordPress. It is simply my favorite development platform. It’s open source, it’s PHP and MySQL, and things just work out of the box. Well.

If you are running live WordPress installations, you may come to a point where you need to make an actual copy of your existing WordPress installation on the same server. I could not find this procedure documented on the WordPress.org site (I did find moving and upgrading, but not copying).

In this case the procedure is pretty straightforward. Here is an overview of what needs to be done:

• Make a new folder inside of your web root.
• Copy your WP files there (but don’t open anything in a web browser yet.)
• Create a new database for your blog copy.
• Edit the wp-config.php file in your new copy to reflect your new database and login credentials.
• Update the “wp-options” table in your DB to reflect your new site location.

I found this tutorial online which shows you how to do it from the command line. You will need some basic UNIX skills, but this way really is quick and easy. Especially if you are running on a virtual dedicated or dedicated server.

The tutorial is written for copying to a local installation on Ubuntu. But you can modify it for copying within your server. You will not necessarily need to setup the alias in the conf.d/ directory or enable mod_rewrite as most likely you will already have these elements installed correctly. Other than that it translates very easily.

Since I use GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Hosting, it’s pretty freakin’ simple to work with multiple WordPress installations, domains, databases, and files. Just get a shell and every file, folder, as well as MySQL is accessible from the command line. It’s the joy of Linux and the joy of webmastering.

Happy Blogging!

Make a Backup Copy of your Production Wordpress Blog on Ubuntu

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Jay Harley is the CEO and web architect of Heaven Interactive. As a technologist, Jay specializes in creating business productivity software and offering clients high-level media consulting services. Before founding Heaven Interactive, Jay led a double life as a web consultant and MFA New Media instructor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. At AAU, he enthusiastically developed several courses in web application design and scripting, and enjoyed daily interaction with design students, offering guidance, support, and camaraderie as a media professional. Jay is now squarely focused on providing Web 3.0 solutions to businesses in the form of collaboration and presentation software, by utilizing the power of the "Web as a Platform."