Disabled Thrive Architect and content disappeared

[Upsilon]

Hey builders, I hope I'm posting this in the right place.

I want to stop using Thrive Architect because it's messing up with my core web vitals performance (you already know that.) And so I want to move to Generatepress + Generateblocks combo.

All fine and dandy, I purchased the GP and GB and created a staging site to make the necessary changes before pushing them to the live website. But as soon as I disabled Thrive Architect, the content on much of the post pages disappeared. As far as I know (and the way Thrive advertises the product,) the content in each post gets copied in the database.

And it's true for some posts.

Even though they have a messed up layout, the content is still there. But the content in most of the others disappeared.

I contacted Thrive but apparently, since my subscription expired, they can't help me unless I renew it. So basically pay for a f*ck up of their plugin, which shouldn't have happened anyway.

So I'm here with the question: is there any way I can see if the content was saved in my database and is there any way to pull it out from there? Thanks

 

[Ryuzaki]

The problem with these builder style plugins is that they save their content into new tables or into unexpected fields in the existing Wordpress database. They can't (or didn't think of) doing it the way Gutenberg does with wrappers that visually display blocks but output the HTML regularly in the published post.

Here's a page by Thrive entitled: What Happens With Your Content if You Disable Thrive Architect?

If you choose to delete or disable the Thrive Architect plugin [...], the Thrive Architect created content will not be visible on your website anymore, but it will still be saved in your WordPress database. [...] Your content is found in the post meta fields.

That's the problem. It's not saved using or accessable by the_content() and it's filters (I think). It's an entiirely different system. Which makes pulling the content out of it's crazy locations and compiling them back into a normal post difficult enough that it doesn't seem to ever have been done.

This is one of those cases where I'd probably create another staging environment, install Thrive Architect again on the first one, go get a 6 pack, turn on a decent movie, and start copy and pasting from the rendered/published view of the content. Hopefully we're talking about 50 posts or less and not 1,000.[/icode]

 

[Upsilon]

The problem with these builder style plugins is that they save their content into new tables or into unexpected fields in the existing Wordpress database. They can't (or didn't think of) doing it the way Gutenberg does with wrappers that visually display blocks but output the HTML regularly in the published post.

Here's a page by Thrive entitled: What Happens With Your Content if You Disable Thrive Architect?



That's the problem. It's not saved using or accessable by the_content() and it's filters (I think). It's an entiirely different system. Which makes pulling the content out of it's crazy locations and compiling them back into a normal post difficult enough that it doesn't seem to ever have been done.

This is one of those cases where I'd probably create another staging environment, install Thrive Architect again on the first one, go get a 6 pack, turn on a decent movie, and start copy and pasting from the rendered/published view of the content. Hopefully we're talking about 50 posts or less and not 1,000.[/icode]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, site builders are a god damn headache. Not to mention that my website, which has under 100 posts, has a database size of over 1GB.

Anyway, I will do the manual copy-paste.

Thankfully, I keep all of my posts saved in Google Docs so I won't have to do a lot of singular paragraph-copy-pasting.

One follow up question if you don't mind:

So the posts are saved somewhere. Is there any chance for me to delete them from there? I mean... since I'm not going to use them anyway because they are not visible... and since I'm going to manually copy-paste them anyway... I wouldn't need them to take space in my database.

So to me, the most logical thing would be to delete them. Or are they as good as inexistent right now?

Edit:

Also, as a clarification: you advised me to create a second staging environment where I would install TA, copy and paste manually in the first staging environment, then make all the changes I want to make to the first one, then push it to the live website?

Because if that is the case... couldn't I make all the design changes I want, then copy and paste the articles from the live version of the website into the staging website, then push the staging to live?

 

[thisishatred]

Also, as a clarification: you advised me to create a second staging environment where I would install TA, copy and paste manually in the first staging environment, then make all the changes I want to make to the first one, then push it to the live website?

Because if that is the case... couldn't I make all the design changes I want, then copy and paste the articles from the live version of the website into the staging website, then push the staging to live?

If you have a backup of the site with TA, you could use something like Localwp (https://localwp.com/). Create an install on Localwp and then run your backup that had TA on it.

Then create a completely fresh Wordpress via Localwp and copy and paste from there.

Once you're happy with the new Localwp version, run a backup of that and import it onto your live site.

From there you'd likely need to change Permalinks and correct SSL issues.

You can use something like https://wordpress.org/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/ to update the URLs, input the version you're trying to correct (http://domain.com) and then the version you're swapping to (https://domain.com).

The above is how I've always done things - only the software has changed (Localwp for MAMP).

Yes, site builders are a god damn headache. Not to mention that my website, which has under 100 posts, has a database size of over 1GB.

Have you messed with Oxygen at all? https://oxygenbuilder.com/

 

[Ryuzaki]

So the posts are saved somewhere. Is there any chance for me to delete them from there? I mean... since I'm not going to use them anyway because they are not visible... and since I'm going to manually copy-paste them anyway... I wouldn't need them to take space in my database.

So to me, the most logical thing would be to delete them. Or are they as good as inexistent right now?

They're probably indexed within the post meta fields in the database in such a way you could delete them with a MySQL drop command. I would be very careful doing this if you choose to go that route. Always make sure you have a functional backup first. Alternatively you can just go with a fresh install when you copy and paste over.

Because databases can be indexed and have keys to search, it technically shouldn't matter if that stuff sits in there. That's the "correct" technical answer. The real world answer is that it somehow database bloat still does matter, even with indexing and caching. It can shave a a tenth of a second off of every page load in my experience, which isn't much, but it's across every page load.

 

[wikibum]

Anyway, I will do the manual copy-paste.

Use axiom.ai and scrape your content from the front end. No need to manually copy/paste anything man. You can also pay someone to scrape the content for you but getting it yourself should be easy. Axiom has templates and tutorials for you to use.

Once you scrape the content, you can bulk import it into Wordpress. Again, no need to manual copy/paste anything.