hcotech

Could I ask what host you are using? Or is this a locally hosted site? Most big hosting companies (Bluehost, GoDaddy, HostGator, etc) have their own file browser that you can use within your web browser. Be forewarned though.. some of them quite frankly suck. I got the slowest transfer speeds in the world using GoDaddy’s standard file transfer within my control panel there. Which is why…

I really like WinSCP for this. SCP is basically the same as FTP, but it is more secure, and allows you to do more. Here is the site for it: http://winscp.net/eng/docs/introduction.

And the differences (SCP vs FTP):
SCP: encrypted, including username/passwordd; part of ssh suite, uses port 22; can put a file anywhere you have privelege to.

FTP: plaintext, inc user/passwd, uses ports 20, 21; usually restricted to an ftp dir on server.

The caveat being that to use SCP, your servers both need to have SSH installed. Luckily, even if it does not have the SSH suite installed, you can usually ask your host to install it, or you can use FTP within WinSCP. To use this, you are going to need to know the IP addresses of your servers.

When you open the program up, you’ll click on “new” in the top right corner. Here you put in the IP address of the server with your media, and decide whether you want to use SCP, FTP, or SFTP. You also need to know the user name and password for your sites SCP, SSH, or FTP access. This information will be given to your by the host in either an email, or it will be somewhere in your control panel. If it goes through, you will be presented with two file structures. On the left is your local computer, on the right is the remote. Simply navigate to your pictures (probably in /wp-content/uploads/), select the ones you want, and drag them over to your local computer, preferably in their own file. There is no picture preview here, so you may just want to copy everything, and then sort out which ones you want to upload later.

Once you are happy with your picture selection, log into your new server the same way – IP address, user / pass. You can now upload everything that you want to the new uploads folder.

This gets more complex with plugins like NexGen Gallery or similar media plugins, and for that you will just need to dig around to find your answers.

You’ll need to change the domain in your wp-config file to remove the /beta part obviously. The tricky part is, your site references that domain name for everything, and you are correct, nothing will link correctly with the wrong domain name there.

I had a similar situation, where I needed to create a test website with a different domain for testing purposes. What I did was create a new site with test.mysite.com as the domain, and then used the “Search and Replace” script to find all instances of http://www.mysite.com and change them to test.mysite.com.

You can find the script, information, and installation / use instructions here: Search and Replace. Just be warned, this is nothing to toy with, and you will want to remove the script from your site once you have it running.

Where there any changes that you made to the site prior to this happening? Your .htaccess file can also cause a redirect loop for wp-admin. This is useful for some people.

Can you login with http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-login.php, or does it give you the same error?

If you’re getting a blank page, there are likely errors going on that aren’t showing up (by default, wordpress does not show error messages on the page – you need to turn on debug mode for that). It sounds like a bad plugin upgrade has crashed your site.

Is this a locally hosted or externally hosted site? If it is locally hosted, you may just need to reboot your web server, and that might be enough to get it at least running again so that you can access your dashboard and find out which plugins were updating and what the problem might be. If not:

Do you have FTP or SCP (file level access) to your site? If so, you could navigate to your plugins folder: /www/wp-content/plugins and copy all of your plugin folders from there to your local machine, then delete the files in the plugins folder. Just make SURE you back up your plugins before deleting them!This will give you your basic site without the plugins. If that works, add your plugins back, one by one, until you find the one that is crashing you. At that point, pull that particular plugin back out of your plugins folder, add the rest, and verify the site is working OK. Now that you know which folder / plugin was giving you issues, you can either elect to not use, or, if it was a very important plugin for the function of your site, you can try to download a fresh version of it and install it.