When you are working with a WordPress development or staging site in conjunction with a live site, there are often times when you just want to migrate a couple of blog posts, for example, from staging to live, without re-migrating the whole site.
While there are some tools, like WP Migrate DB (pro), that let you sync databases pretty easily, that can be overkill for some situations, and they tend to be more developer-centric.
Until now there really hasn’t been a good tool for syncing up isolated pieces of content.
Enter: WP Site Sync
WP Site Sync is a brand new plugin, currently in Beta, with tons of promise.
This plugin is designed for exactly these circumstances. Imagine building a development site where you want the client to be able to input content, then push it to the live site easily. This plugin makes it a breeze to sync up content between sites. Take a look at this quickie demo below:
Some of the current features:
- Synchronize Content (posts and pages) between sites.
- Automatically updates taxonomy information.
- Synchronizes meta-data (including meta-data created with Advanced Custom Fields).
- Synchronizes attachments, moving image files between sites.
WPSiteSync is presented by ServerPress, the team behind DesktopServer – a product I adore. It’s also developed by SpectrOM Tech, home of the genius known as Dave Jesch. He is probably one of the best developers in the WordPress community, period.
In its current iteration, the syncing is for standard posts & pages, but there are a lot of cool things coming down the pipeline. There will be a series of free and paid extensions for specific functions like syncing custom post types, users, comments and more.
Definitely keep your eye on this one. At the time of this writing (June 2016), the plugin is in Beta which means you might happen upon a bug, especially if you have an edge-case setup. You can get help for it at the plugin’s WordPress.org support page.