Anastasia built this new site on WordPress.com through November and December, thanks to generous donations via a Facebook fundraiser – thank you to our donors! Then, on January 12th, we announced that we were transferring our domain from our old self-hosted site to the new site. It should have taken no more than a day.
Unfortunately, things did not go smoothly. We hit a 10-year-old bug with WordPress’s importer that converted many of our 2000+ media filenames from uppercase to lowercase and periods to dashes. The importer refused to import files with special characters including plus signs. The filename changes broke image links throughout our site, causing images to show up as either blank space or a broken image symbol.
This media import problem was hidden until the domain
Anastasia and Karl still have some bug squashing to do, but we finally have the site to a point where we can start publishing content again. On the plus side, Anastasia is now even more proficient in WordPress than she was before! And, while the process was frustrating at times, we are even happier that we made this move from self-hosting to WordPress Business Plan than before. We’re looking forward to the increased security and stability from their service compared to self-hosting.
Let us know if you have any questions, and if you sign up for a WordPress paid plan, use our affiliate link. Our non-profit gets a 20% benefit and there are often coupons of 20% off service with our link. We’ll publicize these coupons from time to time on Twitter.
I’m super excited that the website is up and looking better than ever!
The site looks great!
thanks!