elizabeth

I’m still looking for a good source for up to date instructional material on the subject of migration, compatibility, optimization and maintenance of older WordPress websites and their databases. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Jose, are you saying that the settings in phpMyAdmin have no affect on WordPress databases?

I will submit a support ticket once I’ve had time to look at my logs to see what’s in there. The first time I installed the site on the new host I didn’t know to save the log, but I installed it again yesterday and saved the log.

I don’t see how changing my wp-config.php file character set would fix the character problems that I had after the MySQL 8 upgrade. Wouldn’t it only affect new entries in the database? They didn’t change the collation in wp-config.php, they just added the empty define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”); line.

I don’t want to have to hire a developer. I honestly feel my previous hosting company was behaving strangely and now I don’t trust tech support people tampering with my digital property. As a WordPress website designer, I suppose I should learn more about databases to prevent this type of situation from happening again. My website is working fine for now but I’d like to learn how to optimize it and prepare it for future upgrades. Can you suggest a good book or instructional website on database management particularly in relation to WordPress?

Thanks but that plugin doesn’t seem to have anything to do with database user privileges. Database user privileges is not the same as WordPress user privileges.

The hosting company who migrated me to MySQL 8 from MySQL 5.7 I feel was using my websites to experiment. Every tech support agent there seemed to have a different opinion about how to fix the problems after the upgrade. They edited my wp-config.php file at least twice.

One tech support agent added:

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘latin1’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

After that a different tech support person commented out:
/** define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘latin1’); **/

Do you think I should delete those 2 lines from the wp-config.php files now that those sites are moved away from that old MySQL 8 hosting company?

This link says not to add those: https://ww.wp.xz.cn/support/article/editing-wp-config-php/

I installed the MySQL 8 website on a test domain on the MariaDB 10.3.32 server on the new hosting company. I got the below error:

`Please check the ‘Legacy’ checkbox in the options section and then click the ‘Retry Test’ link.

Details: The database where the package was created has a collation that is not supported on this server. This issue happens when a site is moved from an older version of MySQL to a newer version of MySQL. The recommended fix is to update MySQL on this server to support the collation that is failing below. If that is not an option for your host then continue by clicking the ‘Legacy’ checkbox above. For more details about this issue and other details regarding this issue see the FAQ link below.`

I checked the Legacy checkbox and the site installed fine. The only problem I noticed so far was a missing iframe.

I tested the database for the new install on MariaDB 10.3.32 in cPanel and didn’t see any errors. I know nothing about databases or their software though so please keep that in mind. I only know as much as I do now because of this unfortunate situation.

I am worried about future problems though since this was not the first choice Duplicator solution and future problems was mentioned in the Duplicator FAQ. My only other options for this site is to keep it hosted on a MySQL 8 hosting company (would rather not) or to have them migrate the MySQL 8 site back down to a MySQL 5.7 server, (but I do know that that will break my media library icons) and then migrate that to MariaDB 10.3.32. I had that problem with another site and when I migrated that site to MariaDB 10.3.32, the images that I had regenerated the thumbnails for were not not able to be regenerated again, I got an “ERROR: Unable to load the metadata for this attachment.” I had to replace the images.

I disabled all the plugins and it still didn’t work right. I’d rather not disable the Divi theme, I’m worried global settings will have to be reset with Divi and I’m pretty sure it’s WooCommerce that’s the problem. It only doesn’t go to https when it’s a shop, product or cart page but the other pages do go to https.

The problem only happens after I’ve cleared the browser history in Firefox or Edge. It does seem to work in Chrome, even if I’ve cleared the browser history.

I haven’t tried any other of your suggestions yet. I hoped this information would help you help me figure it out.

I never was notified of this response. I’ll look into this solution. Thank you.