[Plugin: TDO Mini Forms] won’t cleanly migrate from one server to another

I have been using tdomf to allow users to open a series of forms to submit structured posts (pages) to my site. Our development methodology is to do all of our development and testing on one instance of apache, dns-mapped to a “staging” URL, and then a separate instance of apache runs our production server, dns mapped to a publicly accessible URL.

When I’m ready to do a release, I do an export of the staging database, and I tar all the files and folders, then I untar those files and folders into the webroot of the production instance, overwriting all of the old files and folders. Then I take my .sql file from the export, and use sed to look for my staging URL, and replace it with my production URL.

For most of my functionality, this works great. But I’ve got two plugins that don’t seem to like this.

Register-Plus contains all the same database fields in it’s table, but for some reason, I have to re-input all the configuration info by hand. It doesn’t seem to want to accept what’s in the database.

And TDOMF is pretty similar. Now; TDOMF is a real problem, because I have 10 different forms, all with some very extensive modifications, and some “hack” code that works with some modifications I made to the backend (tdomf_form.php).

On the production site, after my transition, all of the forms exist, but it’s like they’re in an “initial” state (like tdomf’s default forms). I couldn’t find where these files were stored, nor could I identify where the information was in mysql (unless it was in wp_tdomf_table_forms.form_options, which contains a huge blob of some kind of data structure.) – but if it’s in the database, the mysqldump should have captured it?

Instead, I had to export each form, using the tdomf export feature – and then I tried to search/replace all instances of my staging URL out of those export files. But when I tried to import the altered files – I got an error: Failed to unserialize data. So I had to import the unaltered files, which worked, and then hand-tweak the URL’s in the Hack form. For 10 forms, this was exceedingly tedious.

So how, exactly, is one supposed to transition tdomf forms from one site to another?