Tag Archives: search

Manually copy content and settings between sites in a WP network

· Leave a reply

I just had a request to copy the contents and settings from one site within a WordPress network to another within the same network. (The destination site is the “staging” version of the source.) Daniel Bachhuber’s Dictator along with the general wp-cli export/import tools are the ideal tools for this sort of thing, but due to some odd circumstances I wasn’t able to use them. So here’s a quick rundown of what I ended up doing. (This post mainly for my own records. If any step below is confusing to you, you probably should not be doing it this way. Use at your own risk!)

  • Get exports of the production db tables (as well as staging, for backup). I ended up crafting the following (614 is the ID of the production site):
    [code language=”bash”]mysql -u [username] -p information_schema -B -N -e “SELECT table_name FROM tables WHERE table_name LIKE ‘wp_614_%'” | xargs mysqldump -u [username] -p [database name] –add-drop-table –skip-lock-tables –quick –extended-insert –result-file=[/path/to/dumpfile.sql][/code]
  • I downloaded that dumpfile and imported it into a local database, so that I could run it through https://github.com/interconnectit/Search-Replace-DB to do the necessary URL replacements. (Could’ve used wp-cli, but this way I didn’t need to have a functional local WP installation.)
  • Did a further search and replace to change instances of ‘wp_614_’ to ‘wp_860_’ (the staging site ID)
  • Uploaded that .sql file and imported
  • Next, I had to handle files. Normally this would take 30 seconds at the command line, but permissions were locked down on this server: my SSH user didn’t have proper permissions to modify some of the directories in blogs.dir. So I wrote a quick script that would run the necessary commands in PHP (as the webserver user), implemented as an mu-plugin: https://gist.github.com/boonebgorges/75e3ec70bd5177dab7dd

Again, use at your own risk.

A less finicky BuddyPress search

· Leave a reply

BuddyPress search, out of the box, is not very good. Say you’re looking for a group called “History of Wars in America”. The search term Wars in America will return the group, but America Wars will not. (Technical reason: search terms get lumped as a single string into a MySQL LIKE clause.)

I have some ideas about how to improve this behavior in BuddyPress itself, including stealing some of the goodies that recently went into WordPress. But for now, here’s a simple drop-in filter that fixes the word-wise problem.

(if the formatting is messed up, view the original at https://gist.github.com/boonebgorges/8301715)

Something very similar would work for members searches, though the query variables passed along to the filters probably have a slightly different syntax. (I made these changes for City Tech OpenLab, whose members queries are custom anyway.)

Again, this filter is not perfect – it doesn’t try to do any caching, it doesn’t look for literal strings in quotes, etc – but you might find it useful until some real fixes are in place in BP.