Content missing & cornerstone not showing content

So it’s an odd one, going to migrate a staging site, checking everything over. For some reason, 6 pages under a menu item are messed up, only those pages. Header type images set for both desktop and mobile are missing, one page all the content is completely gone. I went into edit page in cornerstone, see if I needed to publish or save to draft and republish to fix it. When I do this, cornerstone is empty for those 6 pages, just those pages. No content at all is shown there, no blocks, nothing, yet when you view that page, content is showing up. So is cornerstone dropping the content? If so, why now? Was fine last thursday, nothing done between now and then besides double checking things and found the issues.

How can the content show up when viewing the staging site but when I go to edit all the content I put there, it’s not there? Open to any suggestions, found some similar posts, but nothing like this exactly and after trying tips in the others, nothing changed.

Just found out this is happening on other pages as well now, which didn’t exist 30 minutes ago. I should mention I reloaded a backup of the site that I had saved to prepare for the migration over and exact same issues are happening, so all the work I’ve put in could possibly be lost due to some glitch or issue with x theme it looks like.

Thanks.

Hi @digitalpulp,

Thank you for writing in, based on your post it’s either (but not limited) to your migration process did not work well or your site’s caching feature is messing things up by serving a cached version of your pages or it can be both.

Please Clear and deactivate all your caching features (if any), while we troubleshoot this issue.

Provide us login credentials in a secure note so we can take a look.

Cheers!

Thanks, tried clearing all the cache, even the backup seems corrupted though. Adding login for admin in the secure note, thanks for taking a look, just not sure what is going on and would love to avoid having to rebuild everything. Should note that no caching plugins exist for this site, which is odd also. Migration through godaddy and was pretty straightforward, just needed to reconnect links for images, when that failed I put it back into a staging site to try and fix whatever is causing the issue.

Hi @digitalpulp,

Thank you for the credentials, but I am afraid the migration process did not preserve the page serialize data that Cornerstone needs.

What you’re seeing on your pages now are the generated shortcodes, while that is the reason why you’re still seeing your content on the front end, it’s not the data that Cornerstone reads, that is why Cornerstone comes up empty.

I advise restoring the database from the date before the migration process.

Then migrate it again following the method provided here.

Let us know how it goes,
Cheers!

How would I restore the database from the date before? Steps for doing that? Is that in the x theme itself or something else, never had to do this before, always been pretty straightforward.

Thanks.

Hi @digitalpulp,

Please follow this article:

Every hosting always has the backup feature. You should contact your hosting provider if you can’t restore the backup.

Hope it helps :slight_smile:

So this is a hosting feature, not a an x theme item, ok, thanks, that wasn’t clear. I’ll take a look then, lot of extra work just to move a site, never this complicated before.

What if I choose to not to restore the database and just rebuild the pages, that seems a lot quicker instead of waiting on something. The backup I used was one that was in perfect working order, so no idea on why restoring from that didn’t work, so rebuilding the pages is my best option. But I notice some new issues copying and pasting text in, seems like the theme has lost some of the luster it once had.

Also, that migrate DB plugin said wordpress to wordpress, as I mentioned this will be wordpress to replace a site that wasn’t wordpress, so will this even work or will i be back here again trying to fix things?

Hi @digitalpulp,

Yes, you can rebuild those page in Cornerstone if you’re comfortable doing that.

I don’t see any issues with the Cornerstone on your site when copying a content please make sure there is no styling on it. Paste the copied content on a text editor first (notepad++, sublime, textedit, etc.) to clean it from unnecessary styling and HTML markup.

Wordpress has a native Revision/Page Restore feature, you might want to try that.



We are not talking about merging your dev site and your current live site. We are talking about when you migrate your dev site (staging URL) to live URL.

You’re going to zip your current live site first before you transfer your Wordpress files in the root directory of your domain. The transferring of files in your root domain is straight forward, it’s just moving of folders. But the migration of the database is a bit delicate, that is why some migration method does not fully work.

Cornerstone / Content Builder - Migration

If you’re not comfortable doing the dev site (staging URL) to live URL migration, I advise hiring a professional to do it for you.

Freelance marketplaces

Thanks,

Thanks for the info on the cornerstone and text, yeah, figured out some odd coding was causing the problems, so cleaned it up in sublime and also notepad to just make sure nice and clear.

Ok, thanks for the migrate DB info, they way it is worded is what threw me, it comes off as saying going from one wordpress to another, just never had to move any of the sites I’ve worked in on in the past with a multistep approach, I am a professional so no need for anyone else, just making sure I have all the steps that are required for this theme. From what I see it looks like the migrate db plugin and running that first before doing anything else is the best way to go to maintain a clean move. Thanks.

You are most welcome!

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