Migrate or Transfer to a New WordPress Installation

Entire Site

If you are migrating an entire site, using a plugin like Duplicator or BackupBuddy.

CSV Export and Import

Important

The CSV Import addon is required.

Important

There is one potential issue with this method. If, as an example, you have an entry added with two Cell Phone numbers, only one can be exported, so the second will be lost. An entry can have more than one number and export without issue as long as they are different types like Word, Home, or Cell phone. The same limitation exists for all fields that are repeatable and allow a type to be selected.
  1. Navigate to the WordPress Plugins admin page. Make a note of all the Connections plugins you may have installed. Make sure you have copies ready to install on the new site.
  2. Navigate to the Connections Tools admin page and click the Settings Import/Export tab. Export the settings JSON file. Save it in a location you can easily locate when you are ready to import it.
  3. Click the Export tab, scroll to the bottom of the page and use the Export All tool. Save the resulting CSV file in a location you can easily locate when you are ready to import it.
  4. Log in to your site using FTP. Navigate to the ..wp-content/uploads/connections-images/ folder. Download that folder to your desktop.
  5. Now, you should have all the assets to be used on the new site.
  6. Install and activate Connections, and it’s addons on the new site.
  7. Import the settings JSON file on the Connections Tools admin page under the Settings Import/Export tab.
  8. Rename the connections-images you downloaded to your desktop to connections-import-images (the actual name of the folder is not really important as long as you are consistent).
  9. Move the original image for each entry from their subfolder in the connections-import-images into the parent folder. The goal is to put all the original images into the top-level folder. You should now be able to delete all the entry subfolders as they should only contain variations of the original image that were created on demand by Connections. You can easily identify those images as they will have the original file name followed by an alpha-numerical code that identifies the variation.
  10. Upload the connections-import-images folder to the ../wp-content/uploads/ folder on the new site.
  11. Open the CSV file that you exported in either Google Sheets or LibreOffice Calc. Scroll to the end columns. You’ll find a Photo column. For each entry row, change the URL of the image to point to the URL of the image you loaded ../wp-content/uploads/connections-import-images/ folder. You can test the new URL by copy-pasting it into the browser’s address bar. If the picture loads, you got it right. If not, you’ll need to correct it. You do not need to edit the URL for each image manually. After you have the first correct URL worked out, you should be able to do a find replace all in the CSV.
  12. Delete the Entry ID column. This is not needed when importing into a new site.
  13. Save the updated CSV file to your desktop. I suggest making two. The one with only a few entries in it for testing. The second with the balance of the entries.
  14. If you have not done so at this point, install the CSV Import addon and activate it.
  15. Navigate to the Connections CSV Import admin page
  16. Select the text CSV file and import it.
  17. Navigate to the Connections Manage admin page and verify that the Entries imported as expected. They should be fine but check carefully. This is also where you would find out if you edited the Photo URL to be correct or not. If you see the image, then you were successful. If not, then you’ll have to review the Photo URL and make any corrections that may be necessary.
  18. After your test import is successful, import the CSV file with the remaining entries.
  19. Now, you can finally embed the directory on a page as you did on the original site.

Manual

Important

Connections should not be installed on the destination site. If you have installed it, uninstall it and then use phpMyAdmin to drop the {wpdb_prefix}connections* from the WordPress database. There are 13 of them.
  1. Log in to the source site.
  2. Navigate to the Connections Tools admin page, click the Settings Import/Export tab, and export the settings.
  3. Click the Search tab and disable the FULLTEXT search option
  4. Log into the source site’s phpMyAdmin and export the Connections tables as a SQL file. Use the quick export or default export options.
  5. Log into the destination site phpMyAdmin and import the SQL file.
  6. After the import is complete, you will need to change the wpdb_prefix of the imported tables to match the wpdb_prefix of the destination site.
  7. Log in to the source site via FTP and navigate to the ../wp-content/uploads/ folder. You will find a folder named connections-images. Download the entire folder.
  8. Log in to the destination site via FTP and navigate ../wp-content/uploads/ and upload the connections-images you just downloaded.
  9. Now install and activate Connections on the destination site.
  10. Import the settings on the Connections Tools admin page.
  11. Lastly, toggle the FULLTEXT option on the Connections Settings admin page under the Search tab. Please do this by disabling it and saving the setting, then enabling it and saving the setting. This will ensure the FULLTEXT indexes are created if the DB supports it.