Hi Folks,

I’m setting up a training website for a small company. The site consists of posted training materials and a BBPress user forum. I’ve noticed that when I update the production site from our development site the posts in the forum on the production site are overwritten. After each upgrade the forum in production only contains the test posts made in the development environment.

As far as I can tell this is because both the training pages and the BBPress forum are stored in the ‘wp_posts’ database. I’ve tested migrating all database tables except ‘wp_posts’ and confirmed that the forum is not overwritten, unfortunately, neither is the training content on other pages. Is there anyway to migrate page content from the development environment to the production environment without overriding user posts in the forum?

(BBPress version 2.6.9)
(WordPress site supported via WPEngine)

Thank you for you help!
Zach

[@robin-w Moderator 6 months, 2 weeks ago]

You thoughts are essentially correct, bbpress just uses wp_posts.

So yes if you migrate dev to live you will overwrite the forum, the same is true for comments and anything else that uses the posts table, which is quite a few other plugins you might use later. lots of other tables used by wp plugins also can change in live whilst you are trying things in dev.

In essence you should treat dev as just that – ie not a copy of live, but an environment to check site functionality and look.

There is also a danger if you work in dev and add links and images, these will be the url of the dev site, so when the pages are migrated across all will look ok on the front end, but actually you will be using data/images from dev.

So plugin and theme updates should be tried in dev first, and then repeated in live rather than migrating.

For pages and posts, copy/paste is very easy to use – much of the time you will only be changing one or 2 pages.

If you are using the standard blocks, then switching to the code editor (the 3 vertical dots top right of a page or post edit and then look for the ‘code editor’ choice) make copying/pasting pages and posts super easy.

Yes it is a bit more of a pain, but as you site develops you’ll be glad you learned the techniques