DIVI and Duplicator Issue – Investigations

Hey Shrini,

Did you happen to try the version above?

Hi Guys,

i too am having the exact problem as Sofian777. I would love to try the workaround however my biggest issue is that my website is quite large and I am in a country with bad internet. It has dropped 6 times during upload meaning I had to start afresh.

Is there any way to do this without starting from scratch. As in after migrating and running the installer? any help would be appreciated I really need to get it up asap ??

Dear all,

Today I finally found time to dive into this issue again and tried out the developer version.

I came across the mysqldump option in the settings just now that the compatibility mode told me about.

So I activated it and thought to give it a try even without the compatibility mode, since the MySQL Version on that host is 5.5 so I couldn’t imagine that this would help in my case.

And what can I say, it worked.

So I can recommend everyone who as me didn’t know about this setting yet, to change in the Duplicator settings from “Use PHP” to “Use mysqldump”. It might already fix your problem. If it doesn’t, then you can download and install the developer version as described above and then you find in “Step 1: Package Setup” in the tab “Archive” / “Database” the compatibility mode options.

Thanks Cory for this amazing plugin and your great help. Since I don’t use pro but would like to support you, do you have a donation possibility as Paypal somewhere?

Oh no. On one webhoster it worked, the one where it happened first to me, but now I duplicated my standard DIVI installation to the hoster of another client, and again the question marks. The same archive already worked when migrating from my localhost to my own hoster. Really strange, all hosters are big ones, with actual MySQL versions (5.5).

Unfortunately nothing helped, I made four tries: actual Duplicator, Developer Version, Developer Version with Mysqldump (which helped last time already), and in compatibility mode. In compatibility mode the questions marks in a rhombus where changing to regular questions marks. Otherwise no change.

On this webhoster, even my workaround, the good old searchreplace script, did not work. What a mess. Life could be so beautiful without technical problems :)))

I found out a few more interesting things.

In my standard installation that I duplicate whenever I start a new site, I have typed some special characters into the front page to identify at first sight if the issue appears. Now these german characters ??üü?? appear as question marks. BUT I checked the database content, the table wp_posts, and in phpmyadmin these characters appear normal!!!

Now I got curious and types some more behind them. When reloading the page, also they appeared strange.

Next test: I created a new page in WP and typed again ??ü??ü, and now completley crazy: they appear normal in the website, but in the database they are saved as something like ???¤???¤?????¤

On hosters were the issue is not appearing (I checked the same things on such) I see my german umlauts on the website and in the database everywhere correctly.

On both hosters the table collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci, but on the hoster that makes the mistakes, the database itself is latin1_german2_ci, while on the correct one it is utf8_general_ci. Ha, and the original db on the localhost is latin1_swedish_ci. No wonder that we get into translation problems.

Are we here now, did we find the sore spot? Be right back…

I give up. I drilled it down to the point of a fresh install into a utf8mb4_unicode_ci database, so everything in this install was utf8mb4_unicode_ci. I transferred to the new host, into a utf8mb4_unicode_ci database, everything is utf8mb4_unicode_ci. And still I only see question marks, not only on the screen.

No matter if I use duplicator or phymyadmin export and import. No matter if the divi theme or a regular page. I can exclude everything meanwhile but the webhoster. I will call them tomorrow hoping they have an idea.

Two more things I would like to try: Installing directly on the new host. And using mysqldumper, a tool that I used before I got to know duplicator.

Now it is time to go sleeping. I hope tomorrow will be a day of success again.

Wow, now I discovered that Strato, my first hoster that had the same problem, is even announcing moving WP with Duplicator. Interesting. That means I can bother them now officially, because they promise something that doesn’t work after all on their server ?? Great. Or maybe they fixed it meanwhile and that’s why my attempt yesterday morning worked suddenly.

Corey, congratulations, your plugin is trusted by germany’s biggest webhoster. I can also just say that it is a piece of art, and the issue will be solved in the near future.

Thanks Sofian777, Did you happen to check-out both thread links mentioned on the FAQ? There is also a series of conversations with editing the wp-config.php file settings:

-> Browse to: https://lifeinthegrid.com/duplicator-faq
-> Find question: “How can I fix international characters issues?”

Hope that helps!

Hello again,

I cannot replicate the issue anymore, since my last installations worked well on both webhosts in question. I guess they fixed something, or maybe the switch to php7 which they started to advertise makes a difference, I don’t know. So for the moment I can only be happy I can work as usual.

And one question of me got a bit lost in my adventure diary up there, I want to ask it once more:

“Thanks Cory for this amazing plugin and your great help. Since I don’t use pro but would like to support you, do you have a donation possibility as Paypal somewhere?”

Had the same problem, not with Divi but with another theme I tried to move from MAMP to my webhoster. Today is the first time it went wrong.

First I thought it was WP4.4 because it happened when migrating the first website with 4.4, but actually it’s neither WP4.4 nor is it Duplicator. It’s a DB character set and/or collation issue as discussed here.

Finally this works for me, my hoster is 1&1, I’m on a shared hosting plan:

* I set the PHP version for the (new) domain before migrating, currently using PHP 5.6. With the installation gone wrong I had forgotten this.

* In the Duplicator Installer, Advanced options, “MySQL Charset” I replaced utf8 with utf8mb4 (as 1&1 supports mySQL 5.5.3) and left “MySQL Collation” field (utf8_general_ci).

All of a sudden, it’s working. Maybe this helps others as well.

Thanks again to the Duplicator theme as this is a brilliant tool!
Daniel

Thanks for posting your solution Daniel!

Hi, don’t know if this is the same problem but I just cloned a website with Divi and Duplicator and I get errors in the icons I used on the page.

https://www.tessutiaereipadova.com/contatti/

You can check at the above link:

– instagram and youtube icons on top header bar
– telephone, email, clock, etc icon on post
– three arrows under “richiedi informazioni direttamente da qui” on post
– monarch social plugin icon at the side
– fly in facebook window on scroll X button to shut

and maybe I haven’t noticed other errors around.

What do you suggest?

Thanks!

BTW, my hosting provider supports php 5.2 and 4.

At least these are the options I see in the panel.

I think Duplicator is an excellent plugin, and 99% of the time it has worked really well for me. However, I recently had some issues migrating from a staging server. I was using the Divi theme.

I too had issues with empty layout pages and question mark signs; utf8mb4 simply not working for me, despite having upgraded the destination server to a newer SQL & PHP version. I suspect that the root cause is variances in environments / versions and charsets. I tried all the fixes outlined here – as a last ditch effort I tried WP-Clone and that did work for me.

It would be interesting to compare the processes used by WP-Clone versus Duplicator to see why it does work!