Theme not working after restoring to a new server

We’re trying to copy the data from our production site to a staging site. We’re snapshotting the filesystem and the database and restoring them (then tweaking environment specific values).

After the restore, the tag div/newspaper theme appears to have been deactivated. We’ve reactivated them, but the theme isn’t working. Is there some trick to getting the restored site to work properly?

Thanks,
Brad

I’m sure somebody else will mention, but best way to migrate from production to live site is often using the DUPLICATOR plugin

Thanks for the link. I’ll have to check this out, although, at this point, we have a process that works for other sites (not using newspaper/tag drive) and works for this site otherwise, minus the newspaper theme. It’s almost like the CSS isn’t loading. However, I looked in Chrome developer tools and saw no errors about missing resources.

The site is an adult site—I don’t know if you want me to paste screenshots here. 🙂 But suffice it to say the content and images load as expected, but the appearance doesn’t match.

On production, we’ve got a black background; on dev/staging, we have a white background. Other things are wrong, too, like the font face.

In terms of errors, I don’t see any 500 or 404 errors on the site when I load it, so it doesn’t appear as if content isn’t loading.

Checking the PHP errors on the site, there are some errors, but they don’t appear to be related to the newspaper theme (they are other plugins), which seem unrelated.

It seems like post restore the newspaper theme license is deactivated.

I re-activate the license but then If I go into the header the theme panel all the settings are wiped out. For example on the header the Cloud Library Template is set to “No Template” on staging but on production its set to “Header Template – Default”

I went into production and used the import/export to export all the settings and then imported them on staging. After doing so I can now see all the settings for example the Cloud Library Template is now set properly. However even after doing a cache flush things still don’t appear correct.

I disabled the Newspaper theme and enabled the Twenty Twenty Four theme, then re-enabled the Newspaper theme and now my site looks much closer to production – the background is black and the fonts are correct but the navigation is missing and there’s all this extra space on the top. Highlighting the empty space I see its code like this:

[tdb_header_logo align_vert=”content-vert-center” align_horiz=”content-horiz-center” image_width=”eyJwb3J0cmFpdCI6IjIyMCJ9″ media_size_image_height=”165″ media_size_image_width=”600″ tdc_css=”eyJhbGwiOnsiZGlzcGxheSI6IiJ9fQ==”]

What would cause this? Is there something else I need to export from production and import onto staging?

Is there another way to export/import newspaper theme settings programmatically, either using an API call or via the WP CLI tool?

The site is roughly 200GB in total. Is the duplicator plugin going to sync all the content (all 200GB) between sites, adjusting all the environment site-specific settings in all plugins we’re running?

Currently, we’re using storage snapshots, which allow us to make a full backup and restore in approximately 5 minutes. I’m concerned that Duplicator may not match this speed and efficiency, and it costs a yearly fee.

Rather than start over with a new approach that may or may not introduce new problems, I’d like to understand why this isn’t working. This approach is working for all our non-newspaper theme sites, so this seems tagDiv/newspaper-specific.

Is there another reason why the menus would be messed up after the restore? Do menus not get stored in the export? Are they stored separately?

Can we call the newspaper theme import/export from the WP CLI tool? If so, we could export the settings before the restore and reimport them afterwards.

Thanks!

DUPLICATOR works to migrate all settings and can also fix any URLs like links to /staging/pagexxxx/ to /siteurl/pagexxx

I have used it for many years and if you read up about it online, it’s truly priceless for this stuff.

In our DB backup, we are searching and replacing similar to this:

sed -I 's/www\.ourdomain\.com/staging\.ourdomain\.com/g' backup.sql

Which searches for any instance of the production URL/domain and replaces it with the staging URL/domain.

I suspect TagDiv/Newspaper is storing the site URL in a binary blob or other data field that doesn’t like this sort of search/replace.

If I omit the step to search the database and restore without a find/replace and then do some manual cleanup, things seem to work as expected. However, I’m potentially risking references/calls to production on staging.

I’ll have a look at DUPLICATOR at some point. It looks intriguing, although we’ve already automated this process, and it works fine for all our other sites except for this one site that runs the Newspaper theme.

I’ll have to decide whether to skip the DB search and replace or start over at square one by trying DUPLICATOR.

Thanks

• This reply was modified 2 years by pinktrianglepress.