Hey! I am working on syncing my staging site to my production. We have over 4,000 post in our BBPress plug in. Is there anyway I can export that data from my production site then import it again when I push staging to production. Otherwise I will loose 2 months of forum posts.

Thanks in advance!

[@robin-w Moderator 2 years, 7 months ago]

Staging sites can be very useful, but they have limited capability.

In essence the forums are stored in the posts and postmeta tables in the database.

At best, if none of your staging changes have involved changes to posts and pages or any other custom post types, you might get away with copying these tables to staging to ‘catch up’.

Otherwise almost all ‘design’ changes will involve writes to some tables in the database, so you will have the staging database with some changes, and the live site with others, making matching them back very hard.

Unless you staging site changes are very complex, you might do better to simply note every change you make in staging as a list of actions.

Then when you are ready to go live, take a further live site copy to staging, put your live site in maintenance, and repeat your list of changes on staging to validate that they work, then sync staging back to live.

Sorry, but that’s the best I can offer

[@ourliferediscovered Participant 2 years, 7 months ago]

Thank you so much for the reply. I completely understand. Copy and paste was going to be my back up and it will take time but it is better than loosing all the data.