I have a client who using MT 4.37 for their site, several related blog and one more-or-less static "blog" for a series of tutorials.
On their development server, I have added a breadcrumb trail to a client's tutorial blog, along with new category pages for when people click on the breadcrumbs. They spent several days customizing the excerpts for each "lesson" extry and adding category descriptions, all of which are now used on those breadcrumb-to-category pages. (There are almost 300 lessons.) I thought the best way to move this to their production server would be to Backup this blog on dev, and Restore during off-peak time on production.
Now, I have found out that they have been making minor edits over the past year to these lessons, but only on production, edits which they don't want to lose. I could easily push and refresh the Template Set (we have one) for the changes to the layout, but I don't know how to merge the customized excerpts and category descriptions on dev, with the revised entry text on production.
Is there any import/export magic, even if it involved meld or some other merge tool as an intermediate step, that would save having to re-enter all these excerpts and descriptions?
(Both servers are running linux, and we have command-line access, as well as access to the MT admin interface.)
Reported on Movable Type 4.3
Hi Van,
You may like to backup both databases and then to extract data from the mt_entry table like entry_id and entry_excerpt.
Use those details to construct mysql update commands for all the 300 lines.
The same concept could be used also for the category descriptions.
Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru
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@Mihai Bocsaru,
Thanks for the suggestion. Your idea worked great.
I didn't have to do a full backup, just a:
SELECT entry_excerpt,entry_basename FROM mt_entry WHERE entry_blog_id=44 INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/excerpts.sql' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY "'" LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';
then I used some vim search-and-replace commands to change the raw CSV data into appropriate UPDATE statements.
(I couldn't use the entry_id field because when the original table was pushed to production, the entries were created with different IDs.)
You're welcome!
You could definitely backup only the table that you are going to change, but I've suggested a full backup just in case you won't be very technical to understand the difference in between creating a backup for a specific table or a full one ;)
Glad to hear you've got it working.