wp-dbadmin or similar for multisite

Use phpmyadmin on the server side, not from inside multisite. That’s what is recommended.

Shame, this is a sweet plugin which does so much more than backups. And makes a much better fist of the interface than phpmyadmin which remains locked into a hideous and unnecessary complexity. It’s about as friendly as a cornered rodent.

Thanks for the advice Andrea.

Incidentally, off topic but mentioned because I know you have been very involved with it. The sitewide tags plugin has been a real boon. I nearly didn’t use it because of what it is called, just couldn’t see why anything with that name would address the fundamental issue of calling posts from networked sites that is such an obvious weakness of V3. But it got me over a huge hurdle with an artists networking site.

Maybe contact the author & see if they’ll fix it? (the db plugin that is)

There are more in the repo, you’ll just have to try them. I either go with phpmyadmin or do it via ssh.

Which plugin do you mean by ‘wp-dbadmin’? I can’t find any by that name in the repo. We could give you better alternate suggestions if we knew which one you were using and, thus, what its capabilities and features are.

Please link to the plugin ??

My mistake, wp-DBManager.

This is the source https://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-dbmanager

Ah. He’s not providing support for his plugins anymore (though he says they should all work fine with 3.0).

You can try reading here https://forums.lesterchan.net/index.php?board=11.0 and maybe someone else has sorted this out, but he got a cool job that sucks up his free time ?? Miss him!

Or just look in the plugin repo?

Odds are, unless it specifically says multisite, any one you find that works may still be accessible by other site admins in your network.

Which means they could go look at the entire db as well…. which is usually not good in most cases. Only Super Admins should be able to see stuff like that.

Yeah, I guess you are spot on with that one Andrea. No problem, I’ll just bight my tongue and go back to phpmyadmin. Thanks for the advice guys

You can take a look at BackupBuddy. It is in beta for multisite. Just got it and testing it out myself. Am trying to do subsite duplication and not working that well (fails to duplicate NextGen Gallery data) but for backups I think it’ll do just fine.

(fails to duplicate NextGen Gallery data)

It’s partly the way NextGen does stuff, as our Replicator won’t copy NG data either.

Andrea, can you clarify a couple of points for me? I am light on PHP/database experience but still trying to piece together the bigger picture and best workflow…

The NextGen Gallery data is inside the WordPress database, right? I see 3 table “rows” related to “ngg”. So how does a duplicator/replicator ignore some of the tables in the database; are some *more* WP than others, in that database?

The other thing I have noticed is that the duplicator from BackupBuddy actually does create those three “wp_ngg” tables but they seem to be empty (when I compare with the size of the tables in the original site).

What I have been able to muster as a workaround is to export the subsite using BackupBuddy and then import it as a new subsite. This way I am getting the wp_ngg info and images display correctly. HOWEVER, remaining issue is that NextGen Galley is pointing as the default gallery path being the path related to the initial subsite id#. The single way I am able to change the path to the new subsite id# is to do an Options Reset for the NextGen Gallery plugin. Unfortunately, that reset all my custom options for the plugin so I then have to redo.

Based on your experience and the info above, do you have any better way of being able to duplicate a subsite and keep NGG info and plugin options intact?

Thank you.

Strategerizer – The plugin copies the default tables (wp_options, etc). ngg_ is specific to a plugin. They would have to code in ngg specially, and know how it names tables per site.

Based on your experience and the info above, do you have any better way of being able to duplicate a subsite and keep NGG info and plugin options intact?

Manual copy. But. I didn’t know ngg was multisite aware. Do they name things ngg_x_, where X is the site number?

Like Ipsteu said – manual copy.

Thanks for the input, it is starting to make more sense.

Looks like NGG is multisite aware as I see the NGG related tables when I inspect the WP database from the WP-DBmanager plugin. For example, I see:

400 razv_52_ngg_album 1 124 bytes 2.0 KiB 0 bytes
401 razv_52_ngg_gallery 3 516 bytes 2.0 KiB 0 bytes
402 razv_52_ngg_pictures 23 11.6 KiB 3.0 KiB 0 bytes

Note my WP database prefix is “razv”. So my understanding now is those three tables are multisite aware and are NGG tables specific for subsite id# 52 and residing in the WP database. However, a typical WP database backup would ignore these tables, right? I guess I would have expected all backups to provide an option for backing up the whole database, not just some known specific sub-set… am I missing something here?

Luckily the BackupBuddy has an option to:

Backup all database tables: Enable backing up all tables in your database (not just WordPress tables). Use this if your plugins create their own custom tables. [disabled by default]

When I enabled it, bam; it did backup the NGG data and then when I restored the backup in a new subsite, the NGG data was there too. That part seemed to work swiftly. The one it got stuck was that NGG hard-codes somehow the path to the subsite id# so restoring int the new subsite still has the gallery path hard-wired and pointing to the initial site. A plugin reset takes care of hat. I loose my custom settings but I guess I can’t have everything. Still sounds like a heck of a lot easier than the alternative of doing all the steps manually… (at least given my unfamiliarity with PHPadmin)

Makes sense?

However, a typical WP database backup would ignore these tables, right?

There is no ‘typical’ WP DB backup.

My method is to back up the whole database, so it always gets everything. If a PLUGIN is not, that’s the plugin.