I’ve spent a lot of time this morning looking into an issue with a client site migration where Page Builder data was lost after the migration.
I have migrated many many WordPress sites by exporting the database, replacing the old URL with the new URL in the exported SQL and re-importing. Never had an issue. But in this case I did, and it’s related to how Page Builder stores data. This data is serialized, and the serialization stores both the data and its length. So a snippet of stored data looks like this:
s:160:"<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-2348" src="http://test.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tulips.jpg" alt="Tulips" width="200" height="150" /></p>"
Super…so if you run a global replace on the domain name you end up with this:
s:160:"<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-2348" src="http://production.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tulips.jpg" alt="Tulips" width="200" height="150" /></p>"
Which looks fine, but it isn’t because the serialization is now incorrect as the length of the serialized string has changed from 160 characters to 166 characters. Result: lost Page Builder data.
The correct update should be:
s:166:"<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-2348" src="http://production.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tulips.jpg" alt="Tulips" width="200" height="150" /></p>"
Clearly doing this is impracticable and fortunately there’s a plugin that handles this which is WP Migrate DB.
Tags: wordpress