Tabs not showing after migration from another URL

Hey Ryan,

I don’t know why a WordPress table wouldn’t be created with the auto-increment flag! Although I don’t think that’s the issue with your custom tabs, I think that could break some WordPress queries. Have you noticed other areas of your site breaking?

I think some of the serialized data you pasted earlier got corrupted somehow. Why did those characters come out the way they did in the message board while they looked fine in the database? Also, if you notice, the quotes are “fancy” quotes. They look like ” compared to your standard “. Do you know if the quotes look like that in the database?

Any character change can break a serialized value so I’m trying to find out if these funky characters are the problem.

Let me know.

Cheers,
Kevin.

Thanks Kevin,
The data I posted with the funky numbers actually also looks like that in the new database! So I guess that’s the problem? Not sure about the quotes though – they both look exactly the same on my end?
Do you have any ideas on how I’d go about fixing this?

Thanks again!
Ryan

You also asked if I’ve noticed if there’s any other areas of the site breaking.. Not that I’ve noticed, everything seems fine. Though I’m a little nervous now ??

EDIT: I’ve combed through the database and for some bizarre reason the auto increment is still there.. it’s just moved to the bottom of the file. After some testing I’ve found the primary key is still auto incrementing and everything’s fine on that front.

Just those wacky numbers to sort out now. If you have any ideas I’d be really really grateful.

Thanks!

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by ryharri.

Hey Ryan,

The data I posted with the funky numbers actually also looks like that in the new database! So I guess that’s the problem?

I think so too.

Not sure about the quotes though – they both look exactly the same on my end?

It must be a WordPress forums thing. They look exactly the same to me after I posted it. I don’t think that’s the issue.

I’ve combed through the database and for some bizarre reason the auto increment is still there..

Good. Don’t be worried about stuff on your site breaking; this was the only cause for concern.

Okay now back to the main issue: cleaning up the funky characters. I hope I don’t get too technical here. I’m using the example you sent earlier of a single product’s custom tabs (from the DB).

When I copy and paste what’s in your database into my editor this is the line we’re concerned with: https://imgur.com/a/RfdJ3gh

I believe this is what we want it to look like: https://imgur.com/q8wSuLP.

So let’s try to replace the characters manually at first. I would advise you to edit this product’s custom tabs in the database directly, replacing the text shown in image 1 with what image 2 looks like. Do this only for that one product and test it out afterwards. If it works, we can run a script to do it for all of them.

Does that make sense?

Let me know.

Cheers,
Kevin.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by yikesitskevin.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by yikesitskevin.

Hi Kevin, thanks for the help that’s all really useful.

Just changing the bit we talked about isn’t enough to fix the problem, but I found out that if I copy the whole line from the old database and paste it over the top of the corrupted one, that single products tabs start to work again. I then found out that there are a couple more dodgy characters in each entry.

Is it the case that the new db has to exactly match the old one for the tabs to show up?

Here’s a picture of what I mean https://pasteboard.co/HsIdn3L.png

Hi Kevin, just to let you know I’ve sorted it!

I replaced the funky characters like you said around the numbers, then I removed ? characters which had appeared for some reason, then I realised you were right about the ‘fancy’ quotes instead of normal ones, but I realised they should have actually been there. For some reason, fancy quotes were in the original database so I added them back using find and replace for all 200+ products and it’s worked!

Thanks very much for all the help!

Best wishes,
Ryan

That’s glorious news. A lot of these DB issues never get resolved. Really happy that you were able to fix this. Nice job.

Do you have any idea how it happened in the first place? Usually when these characters are introduced it’s an encoding/charset issue but I thought that wasn’t the case? If you know, let me know.

Regardless, glad everything is working Ryan.

Cheers,
Kevin.

Hi Kevin,

I’m honestly totally unsure how this happened. I’ve tried replicating the issue by exporting and importing the old (clean) database a number of times with different configurations, just for my own sanity, but I can’t reproduce the issue. It’s a shame I didn’t realise the problem straight away otherwise I could have just done the import again weeks ago and I’m sure it would have been successful. Nevertheless, up and running now with your help.

Thanks again!