[Support request] Transferring site components

[Scott]

TL;DR: What methods are you using to transfer individual WP site components from one site to another?

Hi all. We’ve built a moderately-large site consisting of about 500 pages, 60+ reusable blocks, a dozen page templates using GP Elements, etc. We need a way to transfer individual components of the site from development to production without disrupting the entire site and team by doing a full site copy. Doing a full site copy-and-replace isn’t a viable option; we have multiple developers working on multiple components at any given time in development, and we have multiple copywriters adding content at any given time in production. This kind of rules out full-site copy-and-replace in either direction.

I tried using the WP export/import utility to transfer Elements. That works in a limited sense; it transfers the code (Gutenberg or no) from one system to another, and I have granular control over which Element is getting transferred. But it does not even attempt to carry over images the Element may be using as far as I can tell; I moved one and had to manually re-specify/connect the images, importing them into the media library first if they were not yet transferred.

Although not GP-specific, I’d like to hear what people say about transferring Reusable Blocks, too. They suffer the same kinds of problems. One additional irritant is that, whether I transfer them using standard WP export/import, or use the more targeted Export as JSON method, when imported, updates to an element are imported as a new reusable block rather than replacing the existing one. That’s a shame.

[David]

Hi there,

have you spoken with your hosting provider as i know some can help with pushing staging changes to a live site that are limited to certain parts of the database. So you could keep a staging site open and just update the reusable block and element post types

[Scott]

I know what you mean, I’m pretty sure Pantheon offers something like that. But in this case we’re using Kinsta, and they don’t. I think I’m going to have to end up writing some code for this to get it as automated as I’d want it to be.

—scott

[David]

Kinsta has selective push for its staging but it is limited to a file, the database or all – which isn’t particularly granular. Although their tech experts may be able to expand on that….
There were some plugins being developed such as Version Press that promised this kind of feature but that looks to be abandoned.
Its the kind of feature, especially with the amount of multi user sites, that would be baked into WP or at least WP hosting solutions.

I would be interested to know what solutions you find.

[Scott]

I am investigating products that allow you to merge database changes. There used to be several projects/products that allowed for the granular transfer of just a fragment of the database, but most of them have closed down. One that remains is https://wpmerge.io/, and I’m looking into that further.

—scott

[David]

Nice find, thanks for sharing that, i am sure others will find it useful!!

[Author]

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