njwebwiz

@macmanx – I agree that WP is a community-developed project, and I really do appreciate the developers who contribute to it. I guess I’m saying that WordPress is like a bunch of shovels laying on the ground – the beautiful swimming pool only happens when enough people pick up the shovels and dig. It may be “the best at what it does”, but I’m fuzzy on exactly what that is or what its “intended capabilities” are. WP is certainly not the best or easiest way to provide non-techies WYSIWYG content editing (I’m looking into Unify and Perch for that). And it’s not really a solid or robust CMS. I suppose I’m mainly disappointed because I’d heard so many good things about WP, and only recently had the (client provided) opportunity to get my feet wet, but have only gone from one frustration to the next. At this point, the site I’m building is working, but I’ve had to cobble together so many plugins and hacks that I’m not sure stable or extensible it’s going to be.

The current site is live and I’m doing the new site on a development server, so the server name will be different. But I don’t think that’s a big deal. I’m comfortable enough looking at SQL and tweaking raw code.

My concern is that simply bringing the entire old database over will break a lot of stuff in the new site. The current site has a certain combination of pages and posts (and I mean that in the WordPress way). The new site has a certain, but different, combination of pages and posts. Plus, some categories (and their hierarchy) have changed. So there’s not a 1:1 matching from the current site to the new one.

I guess I was hoping there was a way to export just the posts from one site, then import them into the new one, while leaving everything else alone. I suppose I could do a full db backup on the new site, then try your suggestion to see what happens. But I anticipate a lot of problems, if the site even loads in a browser.

@ipstenu – OK, that gets rid of the rows that are revisions. But I don’t think I can just import the wp_posts table into the new database in isolation. Aren’t there keys into other tables that would not get set properly? And what about category IDs?

@esmi – Bingo! It was a plugin conflict. I can’t identify exactly which one, because activated individually, everything works fine. It’s the combination of two or more being activated that causes the problem. I narrowed it down to one plugin that’s fine on its own but isn’t playing nice with the others. Luckily, it’s one that isn’t critical.

Thanks again for the trouble-shooting tips.

@esmi – Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll give them a try and see if I can identify the trouble-maker!