[Sarah Coppen]

We are moving our website to a new server and need to carry over all of our contacts to our new website. I’ve done the CSV import and have successfully imported all of our contacts information. The issue we’re encountering is that we have over 1,500 contacts that have had a photo uploaded and the import function does not update photo info.

My questions is that since we have so many photo entries that need to be updated, is there a way to automate this process in any way so that we do not have to upload each photo back into the system manually? I have already tried uploading our previous photo info into the connections-images folder and that did not work.

I would appreciate any direction at all as to how we can accomplish this import without having to re-upload all images manually. Thank you in advance!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Sarah

Hmmm, the best way to move a WP site is to use a plugin like BackupBuddy or Duplicator as they take all the work out of migrating a site, well, at least minimizes it greatly.

If possible, I really recommend using one of those plugins and migrate your site that way. Then you will not have to worry about the images because they will be migrated too.

If not possible, the only other way to do this would to migrate just the Connections tables from the source site to the destination site and then use FTP to copy the images from the source to the destination.

Hope this helps, let me know.

[Sarah Coppen]

The directory is being moved into a completely new site so migrating the old site is not an option.

How would I go about migrating the Connections tables? The images have already been uploaded via FTP to the connections-images folder and are not showing on the new pages.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Sarah

First log into the source site, and navigate to the Connections :: Settings admin page and click the Search tab. Disable the FULLTEXT option.

You would have to log in to the source site’s web host control panel (usually cPanel) and log into the phpMyAdmin tool.

Using phpMyAdmin, you would selected all the Connections related tables from within the WordPress database. They are easy to locate because the all start with {wpdb_prefix}_connections. The {wpdb_prefix} is the WordPress database prefix of the database.

After all are selected, click the Export option. Choose the SQL option with the default settings. Save the SQL on your local desktop.

Now, log into the destination site. Here you can backup all the Connections tables by renaming them or use backup plugin for WordPress to backup the site first. The latter should be preferred. Alternatively, you could simply just delete the existing Connections tables.

After you have backed up or deleted the existing tables on the destination site import the SQL file you exported. When the import is completed, you’ll likely have to rename the tables newly imported tables with the correct database prefix.

Lastly, navigate to the Connections :: Settings admin page and click the Search tab. toggle the FULLTEXT option, disable then enable. Do this so the FULLTEXT search indexes are recreated.

It sounds like a lot but it generally takes about 15 minutes. If you wish, you can supply me with the relevant logins and I can do quickly for you. The details could be posted here as a private reply.

[Sarah Coppen]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Sarah

What is the login info for the new site’s cPanel and the old site’s FTP?

[Sarah Coppen]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Sarah

Ok, I think I have everything I need now… but…

I logged in both admins and found that the entries already exist in the new site (actually there are more entries in the old site than the new site). And, it appears some entries do have images. Guessing you started to manually update them?

If I do the move, it will wipe out the entries on the new site and they’ll mirror the old site. My concern is there may be updated entry data in the new site that will be lost when I migrate the entry data from the old site.

Before I do this, is this ok?

btw, how did you migrate the site to begin with (in regards to the Connections data)?

[Sarah Coppen]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Sarah

Thanks, I’m going to try to get this done later today / tomorrow AM at the latest. When migrating a WP site, the best way to do it is by using BackupBuddy or the Duplicator plugin (or any of the other free alternatives should work). These type of plugins migrate all data.

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