Hello,
I have a socialnetwork which runs on www.socialengine.net script. its based on mysql and php.

there are about 500members on our site and about a month ago when we had about 300 members we took a copy of the site and installed on a sub directory to start developing a new design.

And now about a month after we did lots of theme changes and added new plugins to development site etc. but the live site remained untouched when we developed the dev site.

So now we are going to launch it and I want to find a way which we can add all the changes that we made to dev site to our live site. We cant just launch the dev site because its about a month old and there are thousands of content added to live site within that month.

Since we installed lots of plugins and took weeks changing the dev site its not easy to do the same thing to live site again and we want to deploy the new changes with minimal downtime and impact on users.

So I think merging databases will do the thing for us. What im going to do is

Get all the files of dev site and get the sql db from live site and put it together. but unfortunately live sites db doesnt got the tables about our plugins of dev site etc.

So do you think merging both databases will do the thing?
If so what is the best way to merge databases ?

Thanks

See if socialengine has a merge script that will do this for you.

The problem you have is that the old database entries will expect the old setup, the new entries will expect the new setup. It would be cumbersome to go through the database and adjust all tables, and there's a huge chance something will get messed up.

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Kris the Piki Geeker

seems like socialengine doesnt have a script to merge 2 socialengine sites

is there any popular tools or scripts to merge 2 databases? if so please share so i could give a try!
Thanks

You could do a dump of your dev database then import it into the normal one. You still have to make sure the normal database that isn't overwritten will accept the changes in the new site.

EDIT: How you do this depends on what database software (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc) you use.

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Kris the Piki Geeker