Database Magic – replacing text strings

Migrating WordPress websites from the development server to the live server can be a complicated and chair-gripping experience. One of the tasks that we need to take on is making sure the URL’s are pointing at the correct server or host. In the past we’ve done a general find and replace in the SQL database dump file with a text editor like Notepad++. Unfortunately, this damages the links to Text Widgets in WordPress. We hit this issue on a recent website migration. Instead of going through the database by hand (which would have taken a very long time since there were over 500 instances of the old URL) we found a plugin that was a tremendous help. The folks at InterconnectIT created a PHP file, “search replace db 2” that performs a careful search and replace of a text string in whatever database tables we choose. It worked like a dream and so far the new database works correctly.