WP Migrate DB Pro 2.0 Released: New React-Powered UI, New Media Files Addon, Remote Plugin Updates, and More

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Can you believe it’s been almost two and a half years since our last major release! It’s been a long time coming, but we’re pleased to announce that WP Migrate DB Pro 2.0 is ready for the big time.

We were so busy getting the new major version ready that we almost forgot about another important event. It’s WP Migrate DB’s 8th Birthday! 🎉

After 8 years, 700,000+ activations, and thousands of happy customers, we’re excited to see where the next 8 years take us.

It was fitting that our newest major version coincided with our 8th anniversary because we have loads of new presents in the 2.0 release.

What’s New

Redesigned User Interface

WP Migrate DB Pro 2.0 contains our most ambitious and exciting update yet. Not much had changed with the plugin interface in the last eight years since we first released WP Migrate DB Pro, and it was time for a new look.

We completely redesigned the plugin interface from the ground up, making for a much more enjoyable user experience. Take a look at what it looks like now by revealing the new 2.0 user interface below:

We’ve also created a short video, which walks you through the new plugin user interface:

Some highlights of the new design:

A horizontal tabbed interface, making it much easier to access the various pieces of plugin functionality
A much clearer user interface for managing all the different migration types
The redesigned Settings screen makes more frequently used settings simpler to find

I’d like to take this opportunity to give massive props to our designer, Lewis, for these new designs. WP Migrate DB Pro really lives up to its Pro name with this user interface.

React Under the Hood

As we looked at implementing the new designs, we realized we’d need a brand new engine to power them. The jQuery/admin-ajax codebase we had in place would not cut it. As the WordPress dashboard was moving more and more towards JavaScript-powered frameworks, we took Matt Mullenweg’s advice and started to learn JavaScript deeply.

We chose React as the framework to implement the new designs, both because it’s already being used in WordPress core for the block editor and because at the time, it was the JavaScript framework our development team was most familiar with.

This decision was not without its hiccups (which I’ll cover later on), but it was great to replace our spaghetti of jQuery code with a more well-structured, modular codebase. We also quite like the benefits of more modern build tools!

New Features

Not only did we redesign the user interface and rewrite a huge chunk of our codebase, but we also added several frequently requested features and updates for the 2.0 release. Let’s take a look.

Profile Improvements

You can now rename any previously saved profiles on the profiles tab, the first tab you see in the WP Migrate DB Pro interface. The plugin will also keep a list of any unsaved profiles (i.e., previously successful migrations not saved as a profile). This gives you the ability to rerun a previous migration quickly or save it as a profile for future use.

All-New Media Files Addon

The new Media Files addon has been rewritten from the ground up and now offers the following two options:

Migrate All Files
Migrate New Files

The All option does what you would expect; it transfers all the files in your uploads folder. The New option allows you to specify a date and will only transfer files with a created or modified date after the specified date.

Unlike the old addon, the new Media Files addon only looks at the filesystem and doesn’t pay any attention to the database. It transfers all files in the uploads folder, not just those in the WordPress Media Library. So now, if one of your plugins adds its own files to the uploads folder but not the WordPress Media Library, the addon will transfer those files.

At the same time, we upgraded the Media Files Addon so that you can now exclude specific media files, using the .gitignore syntax. This functionality was previously only available for theme and plugin files. With this update, you can exclude large media files during a migration, like audio or video files, or files you just don’t need for local development, like PDFs and other documents.

Theme & Plugin Files Addon Changes

Prior to this release, you had one box to list files you’d like to exclude from both themes and plugins. Now the Theme and Plugin Files addon gives you a separate box for themes and plugins. We also added Theme and Plugin Files addon support to our CLI addon so that you can transfer theme and plugin files during command line migrations.

CLI Addon Improvements

Besides the update mentioned above to support theme and plugin files, the CLI addon was updated to allow profile migrations by profile name in addition to profile ID. Previously you could only run profile migrations by profile ID.

Remote Plugin Updates

If you’ve ever tried to quickly run a migration, maybe refresh your local development site, only to run into a Version Mismatch notice requiring you to login to the remote site and update WP Migrate DB Pro and/or its addons, you know what a pain it is. Well now when you get that message, you also get a link that you can click to update the plugins on the remote site quickly.

The Elephant in the Room

Some folks are probably wondering why it took 2.5 years to get to this point. Some may think the pandemic had a role to play, but it didn’t really. The reality is there were several other factors at play.

By far, the most significant factor was learning React. We threw out all our JavaScript and planned to replace it with React, but no one on our team had much experience with React, let alone using React within the unique environment of WordPress. We knew this would be a challenge, but with WordPress fully embracing React, we felt we had to go forward with it.

Another issue was that we only had one developer, Pete working on this project for the first year. It almost certainly would have gone faster with two developers especially since Pete was also doing virtually all of the customer support!

In addition to working on 2.0, we were working on keeping the 1.9 release of WP Migrate DB Pro up-to-date, sometimes even adding some new features and improvements from the 2.0 release to the 1.9 release. Over the last two and a half years, we’ve had 14 point releases on the 1.9 version and 10 beta releases of the 2.0 version!

This was also the first time we’ve attempted an extended beta release period. We made the first beta version of the plugin available to beta testers over a year ago, way back in February 2020. We are incredibly grateful to all our beta testers, who sent in their beta testing feedback, and helped us fix over 150 bugs during the beta testing process.

While this process added to our development time, delaying the release, it does help us feel more confident that we’re releasing a very stable major update to our most important product.

Acknowledgments

Putting together a new release like this is no easy task, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the people involved.

First and foremost, to Peter Tasker. Pete was the primary developer behind most of the 2.0 release and did an amazing job, taking what we had and improving it a hundred-fold. Much of the time, he spent diligently working on his own, fighting burnout and leaving us in a much better position.

Thanks, Pete, we salute you!

Thanks also to the rest of the development team (Matt, Ahmed, Ram), Lewis for the fantastic new UI and user experience, the folks who helped us test (Jonesy), our beta testers, and the rest of the Delicious Brains team who helped make this happen. It truly was a group effort.

What’s Next

You’d think with such a big release, we’d be taking a long break, but we’re already looking ahead. With the new user interface and underlying codebase refactor, we can now turn our eyes toward some of the more popular feature requests we have from our customers.

Migration ‘dry run’, to test a migration before actually completing it
Use regular expressions in Find and Replace fields
Push individual posts, pages, and custom post types
Save migration profiles to your deliciousbrains.com account and use them between sites
…and loads more.

Are you excited about the new WP Migrate DB Pro 2.0 release? What do you think about the new user interface or the new features? What’s the one feature you’d like to see in the next version? Let us know in the comments.

This entry was posted in WP Migrate DB Pro and tagged New Release.

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Mat Gargano says:

April 28, 2021 at 9:08 am

As a developer who has been using WP Migrate DB Pro for at least 5 years, bravo, kudos, and keep up the good work, folks!

Zachary Reese says:

April 28, 2021 at 10:02 am

The new design is cool and all, but is there still no way to do a partial migration of only recent posts? Biggest pain point for me has always been having to pull down the entire DB when I just need the last few weeks of posts for testing purposes.

Eric Dye says:

April 28, 2021 at 10:17 am

Right when we thought it couldn’t be any more awesome! So delicious.

Iain says:

April 29, 2021 at 6:04 am

Delicious indeed!! Cheers Eric, nice to hear that 🙂

Reply

Allen Bradley says:

April 28, 2021 at 12:34 pm

Congrats on such a huge undertaking and successful update. Especially not giving up on React and giving up to go back to jQuery. Awesome work guys!

Evan says:

April 28, 2021 at 12:48 pm

Awesome, great work! Can’t wait to upgrade and check it out!

Iain says:

April 29, 2021 at 6:05 am

Thanks Evan, please let us know how you get on!

Reply

Justin says:

April 28, 2021 at 3:16 pm

Congrats! Can’t wait to try it out. And since you asked, I’ll join the chorus in saying the next feature I hope you’ll tackle is "Push individual posts, pages, and custom post types" — plenty of times I need to push posts/pages over to staging for testing but I’m already working on a new feature there I don’t want to overwrite.

George says:

April 28, 2021 at 3:28 pm

Love the new interface! Amazing work. I particularly appreciate the new media files update. Defaulting the specified date to the last migration is perfect. Although, I was hesitant at first to use it because the default date isn’t immediately apparent unless you chose the new files option and I was stuck there for a moment wondering when the last migrate was.

Kevin says:

October 22, 2021 at 3:49 pm

Hey Kristi, I’m following up with you from the future (2.2.0 release) to let you know that we’ve just added an option to Migrate New and Updated Media Files since the last migration. This new option should help to clarify your choice when migrating media since the last migration. Thanks for your feedback!

Reply

Adam Norwood says:

April 28, 2021 at 4:56 pm

Excellent work, y’all! The UI refresh might be the biggest news (and congrats on getting through the jQuery to React hurdles), but I’m especially happy about all of the little quality-of-life details like being able to use the profile name in the wp-cli integration. One feature that I’m still wishing for, as a (primarily) WP Multisite user: an easier way to select the tables related to an individual site in the Database > Tables panel. When migrating just one or two sites between environments (because it’d be way too slow to migrate the entire db), it’s tedious to have to first look up what the ID number for the site is (so I can identify the correct table prefix) and then manually select all of the tables with that prefix (e.g. if I need to migrate site "10", I have to be sure to deselect all other tables and then select all of the ones with wp_10_*). This wasn’t too bad before, but I hate to say that it’s even more tedious now in WP Migrate DB Pro 2.5: the previous multi-select list would at least allow me to shift-click a range of tables to grab them quickly, but I can’t seem to do that with the checkboxes in the new panel, so have to click 10–20 individual checkboxes to get the same results. I’d love to see an option for Multisite that provides a "select all tables for [X] site" feature, or even just a basic filter that would narrow down the options/checkboxes. In any case, this remains one of the most solid and useful plugins in our toolbox, so thanks for continuing to make improvements!

Iain says:

April 29, 2021 at 12:10 pm

Adam, we hear you! We’ll be adding a way to easily bulk select the checkboxes in the next version and I’ve added the table selection for a subsite to our issue tracker

Reply
- Adam Norwood says:
  
  April 29, 2021 at 12:59 pm
  
  Thanks, Iain, for the quick reply and for taking in these kind of feature requests via a blog comments section 🙂
  
  Reply
  - Iain says:
    
    August 4, 2021 at 8:46 am
    
    Hey Adam, just to let you know we’ve fixed the shift-clicking for bulk table selection in WP Migrate DB Pro 2.1 just released
    
    Reply
    - Adam Norwood says:
      
      August 4, 2021 at 11:31 am
      
      Excellent, and thanks for following up directly here in the comments thread! That’s very nice!

Menn T. says:

April 29, 2021 at 12:49 am

Thank you so much. One quick question, can we migrate different table prefix now?

Iain says:

April 29, 2021 at 12:07 pm

Not yet I’m afraid, but it’s high on our priority list and we hope to get releases out at a quicker pace now that 2.0 is out the door 🙂

Reply
- Menn T. says:
  
  April 29, 2021 at 12:21 pm
  
  Thank you so much. Your plugin is the best. Keep up your great work 🙂
  
  Reply
  - Kevin says:
    
    October 22, 2021 at 3:52 pm
    
    Hi I just wanted to follow up and let you know that our latest Migrate DB Pro 2.2.0 release now handles migrations between sites with different prefixes! You can read all about it and other new features in the 2.2.0 release post.
    
    Reply

Luke Rebeiro says:

May 11, 2021 at 11:51 pm

The fresh new look for WP Migrate DB is great! It’s much more modern looking now and fits in well with the rest of WP. My only gripe, apart from the already mentioned comment about table selection, is not being able to select a specific subsite for the media migrate. This was a great feature of the old version. Great work with the update!

Iain says:

May 12, 2021 at 7:20 am

Hey Luke, thanks for the kind words. Apologies, it looks like this got missed with all the refactoring. We’ll get that fixed up and reinstated soon.

Reply
Iain says:

July 6, 2021 at 6:43 am

Hey Luke, revisiting this if you don’t mind. We removed that functionality in 2.0 as it duplicated part of the process of when you migrate a specific subsite (database, media and all). Is that a process that can work for you or am I missing a specific use case here? Thanks!

Reply
- Luke says:
  
  July 6, 2021 at 10:20 pm
  
  Hey Ian thanks for following up. I don’t see any option to migrate a specific subsite when using the ‘pull’ function. Perhaps I’m missing a step? My previous method was to select the relevant subsite tables, then the specific site from the media section.
  
  Reply
  - Iain says:
    
    July 13, 2021 at 5:49 pm
    
    Ah I’ve just realised the issue here. Our subsite migrations are part of the Multisite Tools addon, and this feature was a duplication of that and removed during our refactor/code consolidation.
    
    Reply

Matthew says:

May 27, 2021 at 7:33 pm

It seems like the option to only download new media and delete removed media files has been removed—is that on the roadmap, or am I missing something in the migration settings?

Matthew says:

May 27, 2021 at 7:35 pm

(And, by the way, thank you for this plugin and congratulations on the new release! It looks and works great, and I am thankful as ever for WP Migrate DB Pro, a plugin that makes my job considerably easier every day.)

Reply

Matthew says:

May 28, 2021 at 1:26 pm

Ah, I see. But this feature doesn’t delete local files that have been deleted on the remote server, right? And it requires you to remember when was the last time you pulled?

Delicious Brains says:

May 28, 2021 at 4:14 pm

The new Media Files addon doesn’t delete files from the filesystem, but it does remember the last time you ran a migration if you select "Migrate New Files" and save a profile with that option selected. Each time you run a migration, the date for that option will be updated automatically.

Reply

Delwin Vriend says:

July 1, 2021 at 11:52 am

I have always loved this tool, and hope that I can eventually start using it again. Unfortunately there is a big ADA (accessibility) regression, making this plugin useless to any company with employees. ADA is the USA regulation, but in Europe, too there are regulations on how tools provided for employees and clients to use must be accessible to people with various abilities. This included being able to navigate a site and its editing tools (such as this one) via keyboard in an understandable way. The tool lost that with the use of the React framework, and this renders it unusable for a large number of sites. This is not unique to this new interface. It is a problem with all JavaScript interface libraries. I have yet to see a single one meet accessibility needs, instead focusing on "cool-looking" effects (the current fad, similar to 1990s web-sites full of animated gifs and fonts). I strongly encourage not only you, but any developer of web sites to always develop with accessibility of the site and its admin as the PRIMARY concern, and only after that is met to look at looks, which, lets be honest, is only eye-candy. I must say that even for myself, who is fully able to use the new interface, I find the use of it counter-intuitive. It does not match other WordPress admin functions, has a very different and unique look within the admin of WordPress, and I find myself having to go back and forth between settings each time because of the "flow" of the interface now. Please consider accessibility and UX before eye-candy for all future updates, and please address accessibility as the top priority ! Everyone deserves to be able to use your otherwise excellent tool! Delwin

Delwin Vriend says:

July 6, 2021 at 10:56 am

Hi Iain, Yes, there are a few UX regressions that I can mention, but the most annoying is that which is likely due to a reliance on the PHP realpath function. Our sites are automatically deployed with zero downtime, meaning a symbolic links are used in the path to the WordPress installation. The section where replacements are defined is not divided into a fixed, auto-generated section and an optional section where additional replacements can be defined. However in the previous version these were combined. What I now have to do is uncheck one of the auto-generated replacement options, and then continually update the saved replacement operations to match current state. This adds a fair bit of examination, change and verification before launching a migration. For example, our sites have a structure something like the following (using DeployHQ for deployments): /var/www/sitename/deployments/current/public_html/… current is a symbolic link to a directory such as the following: /var/www/sitename/deployments/releases/20210501160000 So there is no need for anything to be used but "current", and in fact WordPress seems to do this properly (there may be some other plugins that don’t). So WP Migrate DB Pro suggests a replacement of /var/www/sitename/deployments/releases/20210501160000/public_html (for example) with /var/www/sitename/dev/public_html (for example – a dev site on another server that does not use automatic deployments) or with /var/www/sitename/deployments/current/public_html (on the staging site where automatic deployments are also performed). Going in the opposite direction, of course, presents the exact opposite. But in fact it should be /var/www/sitename/deployments/current/public_html that is replaced, and in the opposite direction the updated path should use "current" and not "releases/20210501160000". So each time, due to the use of realpath, I have to update the saved profile to update all the paths. The above, doesn’t completely describe the issue, and it’s a bit difficult to explain until you see it in operation. But I think simply stopping the use of realpath in creating the suggested paths would help immensely. Or using it as another suggestion, but maintaining the path used by WordPress (with symbolic links maintained). And also allowing the replacement string to be edited and saved in the auto-generated area. Another issue is that once an option is chosen (e.g. Action->Pull), the choices disappear in a roll-up effect, meaning that to change anything means a secondary step to open up that area, again. This will be especially difficult to deal with in an accessibility situation where keyboard is being used, and especially when a screen reader is being used, but even for myself, I find this a rather annoying experience. I think there are other places this happens, but right now I’m not doing a migration and am not going through the process to complete one, so this is the first and only one I’m seeing right now. Thanks.

Delwin Vriend says:

July 6, 2021 at 10:56 am

Sorry, that should read The section where replacements are defined is now divided into a fixed, auto-generated section and an optional section where additional replacements can be defined

Reply
Iain says:

August 11, 2021 at 11:01 am

Hey Delwin Sorry for the delay here. WP Migrate DB uses WordPress’ ABSPATH constant to get the WP installation directory path, and It was the same in 1.9. ABSPATH uses PHP’s DIR to determine the path which points to the realpath of the installation directory. Do you see the correct path on new migrations?

Reply

Gino Whitaker says:

July 30, 2021 at 1:11 pm

Maybe I’m the only one, but I’ve had a number of pushes from staging to production that wonk out the production site. I haven’t used it enough to log specific issues, but one that seems to happen a lot is images not transferring over properly. I’ve had to revert back to 1.9.13 for all of my sites to ensure the migrations don’t cause issues. I really miss the media compare function.

Iain says:

August 2, 2021 at 5:33 am

Hey Gino, sorry to hear that and thanks for the feedback. We’d love to help iron our those issues, so if you do get chance to use 2.0 again, please do drop us a support ticket from the Help tab in the plugin so we can investigate further.

Reply

Chan WEWA says:

September 28, 2021 at 6:26 am

The new design looks amazing. Thanks for the hard work!! Our websites have been using migrate DB Pro for few years but we face some difficulties after the new update. It took us 10 times longer to migrate content while it used to only take around 10 mins, the new version takes almost an hour. Any advice?

Jonathan says:

September 29, 2021 at 6:32 am

Hey Chan, thanks for your kind words. We’d love to help you get to the bottom of this issue, could I ask you to drop us a support ticket from the Help tab in the plugin so we can investigate further?

Reply

Chinamoon says:

June 21, 2022 at 3:17 pm

If I had to ask only for one single feature: make it possible to MERGE new content into database, not replace the entire thing. If I have been working on a staging site, made updates etc, and also on the live site they have added new content, I can’t just replace the live site with the staging database (I’d lose new posts on live) and I also can’t pull the live site into staging (I’d lose updates and/or optimizations that were done on the staging site). So I’d like to do a MERGE from the live site and also keep the current updates on the staging site. I’ve seen other plugins that do this, one is called WP Stage Coach, you check here: https://wpstagecoach.com/question/happens-make-changes-live-site-import-changes-staging-site/ I’m not affiliated with them whatsoever, but just pointing you there so you can get the idea.