Moving events/locations/organizers from development server to production?

[Dennis Freeze]

Howdy. My client is currently using a different calendar plugin (with hundreds of events and over 550 locations, and really buggy code), and we are switching to your plugin. I exported events and locations from the live site, and read them in using your CSV importer on a development server. The other plugin puts a heavy load on the system, so we don’t want to install your plugin on the main site until we can nuke the old one.

My question: can we get all of our content set up and tweaked on the development server, and then copy it into the live site’s database? I don’t see any Export facility, and using custom post types means we don’t have handy separate tables for grabbing the data — it’s all posts and postmeta mixed in with all the other content, right?

Is there a way to get the data smoothly moved into production?

[Barry]

Hi there dff4kozt,

Thanks for switching to The Events Calendar: I hope you find it meets your expectations 🙂

You’re right that there is not currently a corresponding CSV export feature – but there are a few things you might explore even so:

• The first is simply using WordPress’s own XML-based import/export tools (and restrict your export operation to event, venue and organizer post types)
• You may alternatively write a script that queries for all events and outputs CSV – apart from the time and knowledge needed to write this, though, you would not be able to carry over certain bits of data such as featured images and additional fields
• WP CLI offers a neat and highly flexible set of tools that may also provide a suitable solution
• Last but not least, you could consider something like Duplicator

Do any of those help?

[Dennis Freeze]

OK, some good choices. A couple of clarifications to help decide which way to go:

1. The first choice (using the WordPress export for the 3 custom post types) sounds like the easiest, as long as all your info is contained in posts and postmeta…. I’m guessing from your suggestion that it is self-contained, so this one is trivially easy. Right?

2. Emitting my own CSV would be OK — I’ve done a lot of stuff with CSV files (in and out of WP), so it’s mostly just identifying the right functions in your code to process the data. I’m assuming I’d use the Event title to locate the record when processing the CSV file, but I’m sure there’s more to it if you’ve got recurring events (and my client has a lot).

Not familiar with WP_CLI or Duplicator, but I’ll have a look if the first approach doesn’t work.

[Barry]

1. The first choice (using the WordPress export for the 3 custom post types) sounds like the easiest, as long as all your info is contained in posts and postmeta…. I’m guessing from your suggestion that it is self-contained, so this one is trivially easy. Right?

Yes: all event, organizer and venue data is contained in custom post types with some associated meta data – it’s worth noting though that selectively exporting and importing these wouldn’t pull across your main events settings (though that shouldn’t take too long to do manually).

I also want to be completely transparent and note that some users have hit difficulties when doing this with recurring events, though we have made numerous changes since those reports last came in.

2. Emitting my own CSV would be OK — I’ve done a lot of stuff with CSV files (in and out of WP), so it’s mostly just identifying the right functions in your code to process the data. I’m assuming I’d use the Event title to locate the record when processing the CSV file, but I’m sure there’s more to it if you’ve got recurring events (and my client has a lot).

Indeed, this is a current limitation of the CSV importer (recurring event support) so this may not be a suitable path in this particular case.

(Incidentally, if this sounds like something you’d like to see support for – or you hit on anything else while looking into this that makes you say, Hey! This could be improved! Please do feel free to post feature requests.)

Not familiar with WP_CLI or Duplicator, but I’ll have a look if the first approach doesn’t work.

For sure – they are both fantastic tools but which is the best fit really depends on what you feel works for you 🙂

[Barry]

Hi! It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. If we can help with anything else, though, please don’t hesitate to create new threads as needed. Thanks!

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