Question

We run several installations of WordPress without using MU. The whole thing got a little out of hand code wise as there are really old plugin versions, legacy files and lots of potentially insecure data on the server. The core installation is out of date as well as the plugins. Some of those plugins do not work anymore. What we want to do is make a clean cut, install a new version with all plugins needed. We also want to use a different theme. But we do not want to loose the articles, comments, tags aso.

I tried exporting everything with WordPress’ own functionality and then import it into the new system. Works fine, except that the routine changes article id, which is bad for permalinks and has side effects when it comes to tweaks where we worked with those ids to display special extra content.

I think the best way is to use the old database. However, I think I cannot just use a dump of the old version. Does anybody know which tables I need for the whole content thing without systems settings? Or is there any other way?

Answer 1

I would not suggest that aproach, but if You like to try, then:

1. comments data:
   wp_commentmeta,
   wp_comments

2. posts data, categories, custom menus etc:
   wp_postmeta,
   wp_posts,
   wp_terms,
   wp_term_relationships,
   wp_term_taxonomy

3. users:
   wp_usermeta,
   wp_users

As You can see, there are 10 mandatory tables and one more:
wp_options
which You dont want to copy.

All other tables are from plugins etc.