Wordpress, XAMPP and keeping old posts

[Jayst84]

G'day all.

Quick question about Wordpress and publishing a site built offline in XAMPP.

I'm completely overhauling one of my sites, which is built in Wordpress and hosted elsewhere. I'm switching to a new theme (Prophoto, how original) but because I'm also changing most of the images, and all the image sizes along with pretty much everything about the site - I wanted to play around offline first.

So now I have it built in XAMPP on my Mac and want to put it online in place of my current site. If I import the database and everything else, will I lose all of my existing posts on my blog? Would I be better to just do a basic theme change and run through the customisations online now I know how I want it to look? (And swap out all the images). Obviously that would be more hassle especially with re-keywording.

I'm #1 or #2 in Google for most of my target searches, the bulk of which is down to my blog I think, so I don't fancy losing that.

Any tips?

Cheers.
J

 

[Rob L]

Can't you download the live wordpress database from your server, important that into your offline wordpress install, then play around with that until your happy.

Then replace the database and theme on the server?

I don't really understand the benefit of working on it locally though.

 

[Jayst84]

That could be a very good call. Can't believe I didn't think to try that last week. Working offline because it's quick and easy to make a lot of changes and play around with ideas. Especially when you live in Australia where decent Internet is a fairly recent idea.