Merging development site with live site

Question

Earlier this year I built a client a large website for their organization. After that site was finished and live on the web (not on our development server anymore) they wanted the company I work for to build them another site for their online magazine. I built the site using a copy of the old development site we used for their org since they wanted everything to look the same. Now that the site is finished, we need to integrate the two together (so, basically, the online magazine is actually a new page on their live site).

The client has been making edits to the live site, so they sent us over their updated MySQL database and a zip file of the entire org site. I loaded everything onto our dev server, integrated the pages, and it seems to be working together pretty well. HOWEVER, I'm missing pages on my dev site that should be there (like the designed Home page), settings made to the template, etc. I also tried importing their DB to overwrite my dev DB, but it doesn't seem like the DB has the drop tables line, so it won't overwrite. How can I get the homepage copied over the way it should be? How can I copy over settings from the live site's zip file so the dev site and the live site look the same? And what would be my best course of action for importing the live site's DB and/or merging it with the dev site DB?

To clarify, this is my first time ever trying to merge sites and data, so I don't really know what I'm doing.

Answer 1

This is a hard one to answer without opinion entering into the equation. Generally speaking, having a staging or development site to merge the two into is best practice. You can either build this site on your own server (as you're currently trying) or on the client's server (where you may be able to work out any kinks faster than if you develop on your server, then try to go live on a different one).

A couple of things you could try if you want to continue working on your server:

• Instead of trying to overwrite the database on your server, create a new one. Import their data into this new db, then update your wp-config.php file to point to the new db.
• You could also ask them to export all the pages/posts as XML, then import those. This, however, would only get you the pages/post themselves - not theme settings or any other data that may be important to you.

Depending on the client's production host, it may be considerably easier to copy their production site onto a production-hosted staging site, then make your changes. Once everything is running smoothly, again depending on the host, you can either rename folders to swap staging and production, or the host may have a method to push from staging to production.