Cornerstone editor not working after migration

Support
#1

I’ve been a happy customer of X since 2013. I was delighted to find your theme and your organization and have used X to build dozens of websites for clients. It’s been a great experience. There have been a few issues along the way such as broken sites after updating the theme on occasion, but overall it has been awesome and your support team has been fantastic.

However, I am now having two recurring issues, one of which I am going to talk about here and to which I need a real solution: site migration when using cornerstone.

Like most developers I build sites on a test/development domain and then migrate the site to a production domain when it’s complete. I do this using the All-in-one-wp-migration plugin. And I also use it to keep sites in sync. It has been very solid, especially when using FTP to download and upload the package that is created. However, on some sites using X Theme, when I go into the pages (or the portfolio items) after the migration, the cornerstone content is there in the wordpress editor but the page cannot be edited using cornerstone. The page content looks fine on the front end but cannot be edited using cornerstone. For the life of me I cannot figure out why it works for some sites and not others.

Yes I’ve read the workarounds (just export the content as a page template and upload it to the new site) and that’s fine for a small site with just a few pages, but not a workable solution for an artist website that has more than 75 portfolio items all created using cornerstone, and which the artist needs to update easily since I have shown her how to add items using cornerstone and she knows nothing about shortcodes.

I currently have this same issue on 3 sites and really need a solution that works. I am willing to try another process if it works. I read in the archived forums about others having this same issue. And the main response is to use something like the plugin that I use (though there are others, i see that you recommend this one yourselves for people migrating their sites to your hosting. I read about WP Migrate DB process and I’m willing to try that instead, but it didn’t solve it for everyone, so I am dubious about trying yet another process when I already have one that works MOST of the time.

Is there anything you can suggest that you think will actually work? On this particular artist site, I do not have the latest version of the theme because that caused the other major issue I have been having – the responsive text causing no text to show up on the front end of the site.

I am including login details in private so you can investigate. I really want to use this theme for all my sites because I have invested so much time in learning it and because I love everything about it but if I cannot reliably migrate sites, I am going to have to start looking for an alternative:

Thanks, Todd

#2

Hi Todd,

Thanks for your post and glad to hear overall it’s mostly been a smooth ride!

The Cornerstone migration issue, is always difficult, there are many factors at play which can cause issues. When the content isn’t editable in Cornerstone this always means the data was corrupted on import/export.

I wrote this article here: https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/cornerstone-migration/126 and tested countless solutions and methods to ensure it always went without a hitch, similar to you while All In One WP Migration worked sometimes I never found it reliable enough to safely recommend in our article. This led to WP Migrate DB being recommend, by taking the correct steps, I never once has this method fail on me in testing on over 20 sites.

Some things to watch out for:

  • Always use relative URL’s in the find and replace, never hard code the protocol.
  • If your site uses HTTPS, it’s extremely important that the site is set as HTTPS in the wp-admin > settings > general. If the site is set as HTTP there, but is actually HTTPS, the Cornerstone links will be incorrect and this could cause issues on migration.
  • If you use database caching such as memcache etc, always make sure this is cleared and disabled (temporarily) while migrating the data.
  • If you use a shared hosting provider, make sure that you have enough execution time not just for the site but also for PHPMyAdmin. If the import of data times out and only partially completes this will corrupt the data.

Following this path will mean everything will work as expected and you won’t end up with any data corruption.

I did check the sites and my suggestion would be to restore from a backup (if available) and then run the migration process, following the above and the migration article linked to further above.

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

#3

Thanks. Glad to know you tested it that many times. If that is the way I need to do it now, I will. I’ll test it using the process you outlined in the article and let you know what happens.

#4

You are most welcome. :slight_smile:

#5

I found another, much easier option in this case and don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. On most hosts, cPanel in most instances has either Installatron or Softaculous included for WordPress installs. Within that they have a clone feature and I have tried both and the migration is flawless. It’s called clone in both cases and works quickly and effortlessly. So I will be using this in most cases going forward. In cases where I have to migrate from one host to another, I will try the migration process that you have outlined. s

#6

Hello Todd,

Thank you for sharing this great information.
If you need anything else, please let us know.

Regards.

#7

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