Export Student Data

Hi @kombimedia,

When you said you are “redesigning” the website, are you talking about making theme changes via code? Or do these changes also come with content changes that get saved in the database?

If the theme changes involve only code (so that the changes do not need to be saved in the database), you can just copy the same code back to the production site.

On the other hand, if the changes involve content changes that need to be saved to the database, you may need to manually replicate those changes on the live site.

Would it be okay if you give us more information on how exactly you made these changes on your staging site?

Thanks for your quick response @reddotinmotion.

We are using Astra theme and have moved to the Pro version and dropped Elementor. All content has been rebuilt in the block editor.

So yes, changes are stored in the DB.

Is it feasible to export just the LifterLMS user related DB tables from the production site and import them back after migrating the staging site? If so which tables should I export?

Thanks for your help.

Cy

Hi @kombimedia,

I would be very very cautious of any selective database editing, especially at the level of entire database tables.

Based on your description, if everything is now using the block editor (Gutenberg), you can simply deactivate Elementor on your live site and begin manually copying and pasting the content using the Code editor of the block editor (as opposed to using the Visual editor). This will allow you to clone your test/staging site exactly without having to disrupt exiting enrollments and everything associated with it. If URLs are also part of the content, you may need to update those URLs as well (e.g., you may need to redo your file uploads and update the URLs accordingly).

For example, if you are using Windows you can toggle between the Code editor and the Visual editor by using the Ctrl + Shift + Alt + M keyboard combination. Another way to access the Code editor of the block editor (Gutenberg) is to open each lesson/course/membership on the backend and then click on Options (three dots stacked vertically on the top right corner) and then check Code editor under the Editor section.

Thanks @reddotinmotion

I ended up exporting the redesigned pages, courses and lessons from staging using WP’s native export tool. I then removed these from the production site and imported the new versions.

I was able to export the customiser configuration from staging and import this to production.

To handle any urls/links in the content I ran a find & replace on the database.

Everything went really smoothly, no lost data and minimal repeated work.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Cy

Hi @kombimedia,

I’d you are able to find a solution that fits yours needs. When you imported the courses/lessons (and removed/deleted the old ones from your production site), were you also able to preserve the IDs of the original courses? We ask since we wonder if you were also able to preserve existing enrollments after the change.

Hi @reddotinmotion,

Yeh, course ID’s and enrolments were both preserved. The only thing we had to recreate were the access plans for each course to enable payments, and we had to reassign the various widget areas. Both simple tasks.

Our process was:

• Clone Production site to Staging (important to get course/lesson ID’s)
• Redesign course/lesson pages in Staging
• Export redesigned course/lesson pages using WP’s native export tool
• Backup Production site and enable maintenance mode
• Delete course/lesson pages from Production site
• Empty course/lesson trash (important to retain ID’s)
• Import redesigned course/lesson pages using WP’s native import tool
• Flush website cache

This process worked perfectly for us. Over the two week redesign period we retained all new student activity and lost no student data.

Hope this helps someone else looking to redesign their LMS.

Cheers,

Cy

Hi @kombimedia,

In that case we’ll be marking this issue as resolved. Thanks for sharing your process!