Thumbnails Don’t Display After Switching to Domain Name from Temporary URL

WordPress 4.6.1
Soliloquy Lite 2.5.0.7

I built a site using a temporary URL like “https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/~username, and then, once the site was complete, changed the WordPress Address and Site Address to the actual domain name. I then changed all the URLs in post_content to match the new domain name. Everything was good.

A year or so later, there were some changes made to the server (mod_userdir, which allows the use of temporary URLs like the above, was disabled), and temporary URLs were no longer available.

After that, if I logged on to the admin side and went Soliloquy -> Soliloquy, none of the thumbnails for the sliders I’d created were there. The problem was that the “src” tags for each of them still reflected the temporary URL rather than the domain name.

The problem was that the temporary URL was used in the table post_meta for the “src” for the thumbnails. I couldn’t find any way to change it through Soliloquy.

If it affects you, and you want to fix it, the only method I found was to edit the meta_value fields in the database, removing the “https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/~username” for each of the slides in a given slider and adjusting the byte count (the “s” value preceding each appearance of the URL) accordingly. Obvioulsy, you’ve got to be careful doing this, and you should back up your post_meta table before doing so in case something goes wrong.

To find all the entries that need to be changed, you can run the following query in phpMyAdmin:

SELECT *
FROM <code>wp_postmeta</code>
WHERE instr( meta_value, 'https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/~username' ) >0 AND meta_key = '_sol_slider_data'

replacing the “https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/~username” with the value particular to your server.

This little issue doesn’t affect the functioning of Soliloquy, but it did upset my client when he didn’t see the thumbnails for his sliders. Now, he’s happy.

I realize this kind of thing won’t happen often, but I thought I would mention it to help out anyone who does run across it.