So I kind of abandoned this blog for awhile. Moved it a few times folder-wise. Didn’t bother to update it in any way. Pretty much haven’t touched it since early 2016. Stuff happened. I got lazy. Focused on web dev for a while (not PHP or wordpress).

I don’t even know how I managed to kill it. But it was 2019 and I haven’t updated wordpress. Meh, whatever. But it was acting weird when I was trying to change themes. And then it locked me out with a 500 server error. No explanation. Can’t find logs. Can’t view blog past the first page. No access to wp-admin. Tried everything. Reinstall wordpress. Reinstall wordpress with a older version. No dice. Played around with htcaccess so much. Nope. Nope Nope.

So I just deleted the whole thing in the folder. Made and remade the subdomain. Backed up the database. Fresh install of wordpress, database, everything. Just used Fantastico because I know it’ll work. (Yes, I did try a manual install and connecting my current database….no dice)

I’m sure there’s a way to import .sql with the table prefix changed but I didn’t know how so I just imported my old database tables into my new one. I changed the posts by renaming. Yay! It works.

But I try to change the categories/tags tables (_terms). It doesn’t work. Doesn’t show. Doesn’t work to make a new one. I can see that it was actually making new terms, I just couldn’t see it on the front end. I thought maybe it’s an issue of writing to a different table somehow via id. But I could not find how to get that far into the source.

I was ready to bomb it again when I finally accessed my error logs. It turns out I didn’t rename one of my term tables.

I am still not sure where the term to post relations went. You’ll think that one of the tables will store it and it will be preserved but ???? or at least one of them is the many-to-many but I can’t find it and it seemed to have disappeared on the front end for sure.

I later found in in wpprefix_term_relationships.

The lesson here is read the damn error logs. And figure out the how the database works before trying to do a transplant.

Or use a simpler database schema haha . I don’t know. It’s fine when it’s complicated and you know about it because you made it but it seems less fine when it someone else’s!