Export tabs for migration

Hi dmccluretngworldwide,

Let me take a look and see if I can get the data to properly export with the standard WooCommerce data.

I will report back here when I can do some testing.

Thanks,
Evan

Alright,

I was able to add the appropriate code where needed. I’m pushing out version 1.4 which will enable the ‘Easy Custom WooCommerce Product Tabs’ to be exported with the standard WooCommerce product data.

Once you receive a notice, feel free to update and re-export/re-import your products to ensure the custom tab data transferred over as well.

When you do, please let us know if everything went smoothly for you!

Evan

After some further investigation this morning, it seems this is more a problem with default imports and Woocommerce.

Looking at the XML generated by an export, I can see the tabs and data fine for each product. They are listed near the end as <wp:postmeta>. Unfortunately, this data doesn’t seem to be imported in, even though the plugins state that they handle postmeta data.

I’m trying to do more research to see if I can find some way to import the information correctly, but at least it looks like all the tab data is being exported.

Hi dmccluretngworldwide,

When I updated things last night I exported my test products and then completely wiped the site of all products. After the I was able to re-import the data, including the custom tab data.

Did you update to the latest release last night/this morning and re-try?

I’ll re-test again today.

Evan

Yes, I did update to 1.4, and I also tried the same.

I export from the live site, and on the staging version of the site I delete all products and try to import. It looks like all postmeta data for my products is not imported, not only the tabs.

hmm, are you using the standard WordPress importer (Tools > Import), or some sort of third party plugin specifically for WoocCommerce imports/exports?

I am using the standard WordPress importer.

I’m not sure what the issue may be then. It could be a larger issue at hand.

After looking at this https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/88327/importing-from-xml-is-ignoring-serialized-custom-field it seems that importing serialized meta values has issues. I tried debugging the lines with no success.

Then, following one of the suggestions, I copied the postmeta information directly from one database to the other. It worked! This at least gives me a tedious solution.

After the database copy worked, I tried to export the products on the new site to compare the exported data with the original exported data. There didn’t seem to be any differences, but this export also failed to import again. So, this is not an issue of it being a different site at all, because I have tried to export a working tabbed product from the new site, deleted the product completely, and imported the product XML and the tabs again are not imported.

Based off of the linked discussion, I am wondering whether special characters, multiple lines, URLs, or something else is causing the exported information to be regarded as invalid when WP Import attempts to import it again.

Ok, did some serious editing, and it was the line breaks after all. When the data is exported into a serialized array, the line breaks in the content are included as line breaks in the XML and this breaks the array.

Removing all the line breaks allows the tabs to be imported successfully, but obviously without any line breaks that were in the original formatting.

putting \n as a replacement did not work, so I’m going to try other methods to possibly preserve the formatting.

I will have to take another look into this and see if I can replicate things.

You may need to serialize the string before saving it to the database.

Evan