Best Way to Merge a Dev and Live Site to Become a Staging Site?

Question

I have two Wordpress installs, both with a little bit of different data.

I have a LIVE site and I have a DEV Site. I need to merge the content of these two databases together to make a STAGING Site.

I need to merge the new Posts/Pages/Comments/Categories from DEV to a LIVE database backup, and then make that database become STAGING.

What is best, easiest, and least time consuming way of tackling this?

NOTE: XML Importer will not work for this task as the amount of data is too large.

Answer 1

NOTE: XML Importer will not work for this task as the amount of data is too large.

This tool is by far the simplest solution if there's any way you can get it to work. Is it absolutely "too large" for the importer, or just limited by file upload / PHP execution time limits? If I were doing this, I'd crank up the limits on my development environment to process a really big XML file.

If that won't work, I'd probably guess that you have some mucking around in SQL to do. :-P