Preserve theme settings when migrating from local to live

Question

Whenever i try to move the website from local to live or viceversa Theme Option settings resets. Exporting the settings and importing it couldnot restore the images which is an upload field(P.S.it restores the text fields).I tried changing the urls of the export file i.e from

http://localhost/mysite/image.jpg
to
http://newhost/mysite/image.jpg

but no use. I faced this problems in redux framework, nhb options framwork and even with most of the premium themes. If anybody faced this problem or know any solution for this You can help me sorting out.

Answer 1

I will suggest not to replace the data directly in the sql file. This is because wordpress stores data in terms of serialized manner. The reason for simply replacing data in serialized form leading to problems is that serialized data saves string length with it, so if you replace strings the length most likely will differ.

The search-and-replace-tool takes this into account and saves the new string length. In this case you first create the database and import the sql file. Then use this script to make a search and replace directly in the database.

Answer 2

We just pushed code to the repo that does this for you provided the attachment ID is the same. ;)

Redux 3.2 will resolve this.

Answer 3

You can also consider the Duplicator plugin which makes a clone of your website (including SQL), so you will have an archive with all your files and an installer.php file which will guide you through the setup process on the new host.