I don't trust this.
I use phpmyadmin and ftp
It's the safest way and I understand it by heart.
Just the schlep of logging into Cpanel the whole time to unzip after each upload
Bear with me, this is worth the read...
I'm unsure what your development process is but mine goes something like:
- create the website on my local machine using xxx.local
- move to a staging site for the client to review xxx.yyy.com
- move to production site xxx.com
Just dumping and restoing your database is not safe and is not going to work, here's why:
Attachment metadata and some plugins (Almost every slider I've used) store data in a serialised string like:
a:5:{s:4:"name";i:1211;s:25:"http://xxx.local/some_url";.....}... (check your wp_postmeta table for examples)
What this means is
a:5 - array of 5 items (I'm only showing 1)
s:4:"name" - expect a strng of 4 characters -> the word "name"
s:25:"http://xxx.local/some_url" - expect a string of 25 characters -> the string "http://xxx.local/some_url"
Multiple issues:
If you go use phpmyadmin to dump your local dba nd import it to staging then all your links are going to be refering to your local/dev domain name and not your staging domain (so you'll be serving files from dev, not staging).
If you do a straight sql string update to change xxx.local to xxx.yyy.com then your data is going to be looking like:
a:5:{s:4:"name";i:1211;s:25:"http://xxx.yyy.com/some_url";.....}...
Looking at that second record we now have:
s:25:"http://xxx.yyy.com/some_url"
Except the string,
http://xxx.yyy.com/some_url, is 29 characters long and not 25 so something is going to go wrong.
This can be very annoying when your plugin settings are stored in this manner, you upload your new database and the setting are all incorrect as the serialisation isn't being read correctly.
What the plugin I recommended does is take care of all of that for you.
It allows you to change your domain name on export so when you import to a new/staging/live site you don't have any of these issues.
Plus you can elect to only export your theme, just the db, only the media, or all of everything.
At the very least look into using:
https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
Some toilet reading:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
Not interested. I prefer to build it my own way ie not the drag and drop method.
Yeah - it's not meant for you to create pages in, it's for when you need to hand the site over to clients, then they have a nice and easy way to create content for themselves
