Contents migration without touching pre-existing theme

  • Resolved Keith

    (@keithkhl)


    1 year, 1 month ago

    I have tried to ‘merge’ two websites while migration from multiple single sites to one giant multisite with below steps

    1. Create a new single-site webpage with my most-wanted custom design – which becomes basis for many other sub-sites
    2. Fully copy&paste the customized theme to each sub-site
    3. Copy only post/images (so Option 2 of Primve Mover) from pre-existing single site
    4. Apply the package file from #3 to multisite’s sub-site created in step #2
    5. Fix if there is any errors

    Upto #3, Prime Mover works smoothly. The problem lies in #4 as the customized theme settings are completely replaced by #3’s single site’s settings.

    Since all theme settings are stored in posts/postmeta tables in DB, I guess there isn’t much room to preserve existing theme’s settings, but would deeply appreciate it if some of them can be preserved.

    In addition to the above theme setting preservation issue, the guid (in wp_x_posts table) was not converted to new domain. I had to manually change it by replace query. The same issue occurs in other DB tables. I have used/tested many migration plugins, and I think this is a kind of common feature nowadays. Plz add the function in your next update.

    For other functions, I am very much content at stage #5. All common user accounts are jointly combined across multisites, although the calculation took quite some time. For 1GB chunk migration, for usual single site to single site, it takes less than 10 mins, but w/ prime mover for single to multi, it took over 30 mins for one site. Guess some people maybe displeased by that, I am OK with little bit of lag as long as the end-result is perfect. (so that I don’t have to run multiple replace/remove SQL queries) After all, we use this plugin for cleanest possible migration.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author Codexonics

    (@codexonics)

    Hello Keith,

    Thank you for using Prime Mover in your projects! Regarding your comments and our reply:

    • “Upto #3, Prime Mover works smoothly. The problem lies in #4 as the customized theme settings are completely replaced by #3’s single site’s settings. Since all theme settings are stored in posts/postmeta tables in DB, I guess there isn’t much room to preserve existing theme’s settings, but would deeply appreciate it if some of them can be preserved.“

    Reply:

    This is expected because you are migrating a new site to the subsite – it’s settings, post meta, etc will be overwritten with the newly migrated settings. So yes – we can review this implementation to see if we can somehow exclude some post meta or even options from being replaced during migration.

    • “In addition to the above theme setting preservation issue, the guid (in wp_x_posts table) was not converted to new domain. I had to manually change it by replace query. The same issue occurs in other DB tables. I have used/tested many migration plugins, and I think this is a kind of common feature nowadays. Plz add the function in your next update.“

    Reply:

    Yes this is expected also because it is a WordPress recommendation not to change the guid field. We will however add a feature in the future release to override this in cases where this changing this is highly necessary but not enabled by default.

    • “For 1GB chunk migration, for usual single site to single site, it takes less than 10 mins, but w/ prime mover for single to multi, it took over 30 mins for one site.“

    Reply:

    There are lot of factors to consider for example the connection speed to the site, etc. But generally – yes because multi site is more resource intensive than single-sites. It is running several sites inside a single hosting box. Resources are shared within all sub-sites in a multi site so it is why this appears slower than single-sites.

    But thanks for pointing out – we already have several performance improvements which will be implemented in future releases. But for now immediate solutions would be to:

    • Upload package directly via SFTP to bypass uploading by chunks then restore via package manager.
    • If your site is demanding (high users, high number of content, high traffic) – would be best to host this via VPS or dedicated hosting.

    That’s it and thanks again for using Prime Mover, wish you best of luck in your projects! Cheers.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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