My WordPress Disaster: A Cautionary Tale (and a Lesson I Swear I’ve Learned Before)

#wordpress #mysql #webdev #beginners

They say you should never change a running system. Today, I can confirm that "they" are absolutely right. And that I, apparently, have the memory of a goldfish.

Let me set the scene. I’m a newbie in the WordPress world, getting my feet wet with a local development environment. I had MAMP running, which came with its own version of PHP and MySQL. Everything was humming along nicely, and I was making progress styling and editing the child-theme of a theme we bought.

Then, a new project came along. A different project, one that didn't need MAMP (with Symfony). So, in a fit of efficiency (or, as it turns out, pure hubris), I decided to delete MAMP and install PHP and MySQL separately using Homebrew. "Clean," I thought. "Efficient," I thought. "What could possibly go wrong?" I thought.

What could go wrong, indeed. Turns out, WordPress isn’t just a pile of files and themes. It's a clingy little digital creature that stores its entire existence - every page, every setting, every glorious bit of config - inside a MySQL database. And where did MAMP, in its infinite wisdom, keep that precious database? Right there in its folder in the Application directory. The same directory I proceeded to “pulverize” (my new favorite word for this kind of digital annihilation) when I deleted MAMP.

Fast forward to today. Time to show off our progress! I installed XAMPP, thinking it would be a quick fix. (Spoiler: It was not.) After an hour of pulling my hair out, the terrible truth dawned on me. The database. It was gone. Wordpress didn't find the database connection. All of it. Poof. Vanished. The only thing left were the theme files, like a ghostly, empty skeleton of a website.

So, here I am, about to rebuild an entire homepage from scratch. But hey, at least I got a valuable life lesson out of it. One that I've learned about 50 times already, and will probably learn again many more times.

Lesson of the day, kids: Never. Change. A. Running. System. EVER.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a blank WordPress dashboard.