Not seeing posts, menus, pages, etc. after site transfer

  • Hi. I am working on rebuilding a WordPress site so that it is a mirror of an existing site. I don’t do this very often and am looking for direction.

    The owner of the existing site has provided a complete set of files under public_html and also a .sql database file via FTP.

    I have taken these steps so far:
    ? Setup a development directory on my web hosting server
    ? Installed WordPress
    ? Created a mySQL database and updated references to the old URL using php MyAdmin since I’m initially working in a development environment until the domain name from the existing site is ready to be transferred (the existing site needs to be kept live until the site rebuild I’m working on is functioning properly)
    ? Edited the wpconfig.php file with new data (I had to change the database name and password because of naming rules set by my web hosting provider)
    ? Activated all plugins
    ? Synchronized all settings under Themes and Customize

    When I go to the dev site I see the page layout for the homepage. But none of the menus or pages or posts or any of the feed data has imported. It should look like this.

    Is there a way to get the menus and pages to work without having to go in to the WordPress dashboard and manually copying and pasting the setup from the existing site to the new site?

    Also, for the posts or other database feeds which are not displaying on the homepage as it should. How can I get this working again?

    Thanks for any help.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Have you reviewed Moving_WordPress?

    Thread Starter marymaru

    (@marymaru)

    Yes, I reviewed and followed the instructions on Moving WordPress. I neglected to mention that I synchronized all of the Admin > Settings > General and also > Permalinks. Also, all of the links as far as I can tell on the existing source site are absolute. I also followed the directions under “If you forget to change the locations” and updated the ‘siteurl’ and ‘home records in the wp_options table.

    I’m not sure what else to do.

    updated references to the old URL using php MyAdmin

    That won’t work as some of the urls are encoded inside serialized arrays. Try using https://interconnectit.com/124/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

    Thread Starter marymaru

    (@marymaru)

    Thanks Esmi. I’m unable to extract the ‘secret’ folder referenced in interconnectit’s instructions. So I tried using the Search & Replace plugin by Frank Bultge which didn’t seem to do anything (fatal memory error when trying to search and replace all; and then when doing a search and replace using only a handful of directories at a time, the plugin found nothing to replace).

    I’ll take another look at interconnectit’s download. But am wary of using it since the instructions and actual files offered in the download don’t match up.

    Anything else you can think of that I can try?

    Thread Starter marymaru

    (@marymaru)

    Update: I ended up getting an exported XML file from the current site owner and imported that into the development site I’m working on. And then manually went in to the WordPress dashboard and did a side-by-side comparison of the old site setup vs the new and was able to correct many issues. This was on top of already having all of the html_public files uploaded to the new site’s web hosting server which worked only partially.

    What I’m still having an issue with are the images. All of the image folders under ‘..upload/[date]/..’ are on the server. And yet most of the images are not rendering on the development site. When I compare the WordPress dashboard of the old vs dev site, the images counts are different—old site shows 1200+ images; dev site shows only 250. I don’t understand why WordPress is only seeing such a limited number of images when they are all sitting on the dev web server. Any suggestions for how to fix this?

    Thanks for any help.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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