I’ve been sitting on the fence with WP Migrate DB Pro for awhile. I kept up the same routine of loading phpMyAdmin, exporting, importing, running searchreplacedb2, etc. Painful.
If you are still in the fence, I’d like to firmly shove you off. This plugin is pure gold.
Last week I decided to actually review the plugin to see if it could help me keep my various MAMP, dev, and production sites synced up. After watching the introduction video, I was sold. I decided to take the plunge and by the dev license.
And good gosh am I ever glad I did. This plugin is freaking amazing. It actually makes migrating databases fun. And yes, I know how lame that sounds.
The interface is the best I’ve seen of late. It’s smooth and responsive. I love the instant, subtle AJAX updates. Linking up two sites and saving the profile is lightning fast.
In fact, I’d say even starting fresh and having to install the plugin on both sites + doing the first migration can be done faster than the time required for one manual migration. In other words, it will save you time the first time you use it. Which is saying something.
In addition to database migration, it has a few more subtle features that show the Brad and company know exactly what devs need:
- It automatically remaps the domain AND the the local site directory. This covers 99% of sites.
- You can add your own find / replace parameters and save them to your profile.
- You can backup before replacing the local DB.
- You can have it preserve your local active_plugins setting in case there are plugins you only want active on one install.
- You can skip spam comments to keep your local DB lean.
Anyway, I highly recommend it. I’ve even joined their affiliate program. It’s my new favorite WordPress tool.
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