Migration update: WP Relocate

This past week, I’ve focused primarily on bringing a usable interface to the WP_Relocate class that I posted about last week. While the WP_Relocate class file itself was meant to be something that could be bundled into another suite and reused, the fruits of this week’s labour come in the form of an installable pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party.

In actuality, the plugin hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. are very shallow — merely used to add a menu link (for now). The most important part is the practically-standalone interface.

WP Relocate UI

The design intent was to make this look and feel just like the installer — or the upgrade.php script for database schema changes.

This has been tested against 3.5.2 and 3.6 only. Despite differences in how these versions handle revisions, the changes made to post content are still revertible in either version:

Revisions tracking search and replace

I can test this in code to my heart’s content (except for the difficulties using the current unit-tests framework against older versions of coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.) but nothing beats running it on live site data, especially sites that have posts and uploads from earlier versions of WordPress. As you might imagine, live data is more difficult to generate and test against. I don’t yet know how well this process works with hundreds or thousands of posts, in terms of the time it takes and the level of verbosity communicated to the site administrator.

If you’re interested in trying this out (please don’t use it on a production siteProduction Site A production site is a live site online meant to be viewed by your visitors, as opposed to a site that is staged for development or testing. — it’s probably not ready for that), feel free to:

It installs into wp-content/plugins. The included readme.html file contains more detailed instructions. If anyone tries it out, I’d love to hear if it broke your site. 🙂

What’s next? This week, I am forking the importer plugin that works with WXR files, to examine and fix its issues with fetching attachments from the source. I hope to add some ability to replace URLs using the WP_Relocate class to smooth out the process of copying content from another installation.

Edit (2013-07-09): updated to 1.0.1 with fix for PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher versions before 5.4.0.

#migration-portability, #weekly-update