Why does demo content spoil live site?

So your question is “why does importing content add content to my site?”
Isn’t that what ‘import content’ means? You have some content for your site, then you import content from the theme author. Wouldn’t the expected outcome be a mix of your content and theirs?

I’ve never understood why anyone would want to import demo content into their site. Why make your site look like someone else’s content?

Hi Joy,

Many thanks for your answer. But I’m afraid you didn’t quite get my point.
First, people import demo content to be able to use a “demo site” home page layout with general feeling as a starting point to build a site. That avoids to build a news site from scratch.

I purchased a new template to replace the old theme we’ve been using for years. To avoid building the new magazine from scratch, I imported the theme demo content to select the dreamed-of demo site. As I could’nt find in the theme doc how to set up the home page layout I wanted, I went back to the previous theme. Which has been messed up by the new theme demo content.

So my question is “How can a NEW theme demo content mess up a PREVIOUS live site? If you could answer this question, you’d make my day because I can’t figure out what happened.

Best regards,

P. S.: I contacted the theme author who apologized for the incomplte theme doc and gave all the missing informations. And now, I know you have to build a new site via staging through your host.

I think the only real thing here that we can say for sure is that importing content _shouldn’t_ be destructive, because that just isn’t right, but just like how there people who do bad things or make mistakes in the physical world, the same can happen in the digital world.

I’m sure the theme developers didn’t intend to provide you with a destructive import file, but they did.

There aren’t many checks made on imports, because it’s assumed to be an intentional action that you are taking, there’s no way to accidentally do an import. As such, there’s a trust that you are adequately informed about what you’re getting into by the provider of the import file.

Hi @macmanx

Sorry for the late answer. Many thanks for your explanations.

I’m still wondering how the .php instructions of the new theme overwrite the existing ones from the old template… I guess the demo content stay in the data base, but why is the architecture of the orevious theme spoilt by the coded instructions of the new?

Best,

You’d have to bring that up with the new theme’s developer.

An import _shouldn’t_ be destructive, but that doesn’t mean it _can’t_ be. There’s a lot of trust put into the import process, mostly just because it’s assumed you’re importing content that you already own and wanted in the first place (that’s what the system was designed for, one WordPress blog you own to another, your Blogger blog to WordPress, your Tumblr blog to WordPress, etc).

This whole new trend of importing theme demo content is, for lack of a better phrase, not what the system was intended for.

If a theme developer presented you with a destructive import, you need to ask _them_ why.

Also, always keep backups: https://www.ads-software.com/support/article/wordpress-backups/

Themes style content, so whatever content is in the database is handled by the active theme. It does not matter if the content was imported while a different theme was active.
It’s not that the theme developer gave you “destructive content”, it’s that importing content puts it into the database and then all content is styled by the active theme.

There is a Customizer Export/Import plugin that imports only Customizer options. It does not affect content. There is a different plugin just for widget options. And then One CLick Demo Import, which handles all three (but last I tried it, there is a bug with backslashes in content).

Good point, I hadn’t thought of the specialized export/imports beyond the built-in content-only options.

Hi everybody,

Many thanks for you kind answers that hlped me a lot!