It’s been a little while since our last major release but we’re very excited to announce the release of WP Migrate DB Pro 1.3. This update brings a slew of improvements and features, the more notable changes are outlined in both the video above and the written sections below.
Addons
Our first addon focuses on migrating your website’s media files from one WordPress installation to another. To quote our initial post:
In a nutshell, this update will allow you to pull down the media files from your remote WordPress installation into your local environment. To accomplish this we compare the attachment posts found within your remote database to the ones in your local database and only pull updated or missing media files.
The initial release of this addon supports pull migrations only. We’re currently working on the push functionality and should have it out soon.
The Media Files addon is included with the Developer license and better. If you currently have a Personal or Business license and would like to get the Media Files addon, you can easily upgrade your license from the My Account page.
You may want to check out our documentation for a bit more details on addons as well.
WordPress 3.8 Styling
WordPress 3.8 was released yesterday with some nice new dashboard styles and we’re proud to say that we’ve added a whole layer of styling on top of our existing styles to accommodate it. So although we encourage everyone to upgrade to latest version of WordPress as soon as possible, WP Migrate DB Pro will look great whether you’re using WordPress 3.7 or 3.8.
In 3.8, you’ll notice a condensed the header, with the title and tabs on a single line, saving lots of vertical space. All of the text in the plugin has been bumped up to be consistent with the rest of the dashboard. We’re also making use of the icon font that comes bundled with 3.8 as well as the styles for error and warning messages.
Select Post Types
Since our first release we’ve had the option of selecting which tables to include when performing a migration. To add to this we’ve now added the ability to select which post types to include.
This is a feature that many customers have been requesting for a while. Let’s pretend you have a website that catalogs books. You have a custom post type for these books and have over 100,000 records. You decide you want to make a small change to the website and need to pull it’s data into a local development environment.
But the change you need to make does not involve the book custom post type. When pulling from the live site into your local environment, you can choose all post types except book, greatly reduce the migration time.
License Key Masking
Previously we displayed your license key in plain text on the Settings tab. Some customers were concerned about this and suggested to mask the license key. And although we added the ability to define your license key in the wp-config.php, we agreed that masking was a good idea as well. Now once your license has been validated, it will be masked and only the last portion of the license will be visible.
Subtle Improvements
Although not as exciting, we’ve also made a fair number of subtle improvements that should result in less headaches.
As of this release, WordPress transients are excluded from exports and migrations by default. They have caused trouble for a number of customers and we felt there is really no reason to transfer them in the migration. This should also reduce the chance of seeing outdated or irrelevant update notices in your WordPress dashboard. If for some reason you do want transients migrated, then you can override this behavior with a filter.
Also as of 1.3, we now flush the rewrite rules after each push and pull migration. Some customers were reporting 404 errors on all their pages immediately after a successful migration and this fix was always to simply re-save their permalink settings which flushes the rewrite rules.
We’ve also made a number of changes to the way WordPress multisite migrations work. We’ll leave the details for another post, but rest assured that multisite migrations are now more reliable and cover more edge cases than before.
Version 1.3 Change Log
- New: Addons – reworked lots of code to support addons
- New: Styles for WordPress 3.8
- New: Media Files addon now available
- New: Post type filter option
- New: Automatic updates for beta versions
- Improvement: License key is now masked
- Improvement: Automatically flush rewrite rules on migration completion
- Improvement: Exclude transients from all migrations
- Improvement: Show error message when uploads folder is not writable
- Improvement: Cleaned up code to have briefer, clearer functions
- Improvement:
wpmdb_tablesandwpmdb_table_sizesfilters for tables shown in select box - Bug fix: You have an error in your SQL syntax…near ‘1’ at line 1
- Bug fix: Unselected tables being migrated
- Bug fix: Database encoding issue with Export feature
- Bug fix: Uppercase table prefixes fail
- Bug fix: Errors trying to clone some PHP classes
- Bug fix: Suhosin values assumed to be numeric
