I tried rebuilding a website using a new child theme on Wordpress Studio (it seems logical to work locally and only upload changes when they're made).

I'm trying to export an XML file from Studio, import that from wp-admin on the live site, and then reconcile the missing images afterwards (which I still haven't solved, as any newly singly uploaded images will have different URLs and it can't see SFTP'd images at all). This seemed to work. Better Search Replace found only two references to localhost, both in posts, so I replaced those.

This doesn't transfer my child theme, and when I do, my website starts trying to access my local computer. I removed one reference to localhost from the theme.json, and now nothing in any file on there has a reference to it. It's still trying. I'm not sure what to do at this point.

Every other plugin or upload option fails. Cloudways' own migration plugin can't do Studio. The database editor fails because, while it says it supports the collation, it won't recognize it when I try to upload. Updraft's migration wanted access to the local computer (so I think still had failed URL replacement) and broke some (not all?) images. Duplicator is looking for a function that I think hasn't existed for years from what I see on Google (mysqli_real_escape_string) and failing me because it requires it. WPvivid gives a blank screen if I try to restore using it. (I haven't tried paid versions of plugins, because at this point I think I may need a Wordpress alternative).

It works locally. Talking to a friend who's been doing this successfully for years, it should be as easy as export, import, let Wordpress sort out the URLs itself, maybe toss in a theme, upload and replace images manually. I'd expect SFTP to solve most of my updating needs anyway. What am I missing?

Github - https://github.com/saitanay/unDrupal

𝗨𝗻𝗗𝗿𝘂𝗽𝗮𝗹 is a set of AI agent skills that teach coding assistants how to audit, extract, and plan migrations from Drupal 7-11 to any other system.

Open source. MIT licensed.

𝗗𝗿𝘂𝗽𝗮𝗹 has a Migrate API to move content in. It has no equivalent for moving content out. You're on your own.

There are 18+ ways to just create a static page in Drupal. So AI harnesses struggle to figure out how to take out your content. Additionally, the agents have to deal with

→ Hundreds of database tables
→ Serialized PHP structures
→ Nested Paragraphs three or four levels deep
→ Layout Builder data stored as PHP objects
→ Rich-text fields full of Drupal-only tokens
→ Revisions, media, taxonomy, redirects, SEO metadata

𝗨𝗻𝗗𝗿𝘂𝗽𝗮𝗹 enables your Claude Code, Cursor, Pi Agent Windsurf, GitHub Copilot etc to handle all of it.

If you're planning a Drupal migration, decoupling project, or replatform, try it.
🔗 https://github.com/saitanay/unDrupal

Hello! Anyone who uses Woocommerce, have you experienced the Square plugin for payment methods randomly disconnecting?

It’s becoming a problem for our small business. We have a web company that is supposed to maintain the site but our customers end up being the ones to alert us and catch when our website checkout page doesn’t have any payment methods. I then have to go in manually to reconnect Square. There seems to be zero timing consistency, the web company told us that it might be a 90 day issue when plugins update or it could be a reset on the 2nd of each month?

If anyone has found a fix for this, I’d love to let them know so that we can have a functioning website 24/7. It’s hard to tell if they are just pulling us along and giving excuses or if this is really a bug within Wordpress that others are experiencing too. Thank you!

Not a "WordPress is dead" post. It served me well for a long time. My sites are small, mostly for reading, and updated once or twice a month, and at some point WP became more babysitting than publishing for them.

What pushed me was a shared server that kept going down. What had been nagging me for longer was the steady drip of Wordfence emails about login attempts, and updating plugins by hand after automatic updates burned me once. I moved everything to pre-built static pages on Cloudflare.

What I don't miss: plugin update anxiety, and fighting the theme with !important.

What I do miss, or at least respect more now: the plugin ecosystem. Someone else builds, maintains and patches every feature for you. Without it, every dynamic thing I add (comments, forms) is code I own. And the owners of the smaller sites I moved can't edit them themselves anymore, so I'm effectively their CMS now.

For a shop, memberships or a team of editors who don't use git, I'd still pick WordPress. Curious where others here draw that line.

Longer write-up, including the trade-offs: https://diego.horse/cloudflare-built-emdash-i-built-neighdash/

Hi! We have to build a database for users/members and different organizations of a network. That database will be the core of a big non profit project that is very important to us. At first we were thinking on designing the database and developing its interfaces from scratch, but we are now considering using a CRM. It has to be open source (we are considering suiteCRM, CiviCRM, Odoo, ERPNext/FrappeCRM, EspoCRM, Krayin/LaravelCRM, and Dolibarr, but we have yet to study them).

The thing is that we would then use the database of the CRM to hold the members/clients of the network, so we would need a very flexible database, and it being easily connectable via API to different other web services. I know this should be feasible, but would you recommend doing something like that?

The other way would be to make our own database and connect it via API with a CRM so the CRM database stays in sync with our core client/member database.

For you guys experienced in this CRM lands... does any of the proposals sound more practical than the other? or a third idea?

thanks!

Hello,

Can you share your platform and the annual costs and set up.

Having a nightmare with salesmen ATM hounding me for 45 mins calls just to get a rough idea of costs.

Thanks

I've spent quite a few years working with CRM and business software, and one thing keeps bothering me.

The software itself is often not even the expensive part.

It's everything around it.

Consultants. Implementation projects. Workshops. Custom configuration. Data migration. Training. Then months later you're still adapting your company to the software you bought.

I always wanted something much simpler:

sign up, bring the data you already have, answer a few questions about how your company works, review what the system proposes, and start.

No consultancy just to get started.
No custom code for every company.
No €50k implementation before you know whether the product even helps you.

And I also don't really want 15 separate SaaS tools anymore.

My ideal model is one platform with a small number of apps, like Sales, Support and Operations, sharing the same customers, work, automation and context underneath.

AI should mostly remove setup and admin friction. Not be another chatbot bolted onto the side.

So I've been building around a few principles:

• onboarding should take minutes, not weeks
• importing existing data should be normal
• software should adapt to the company
• configuration should replace customer-specific code
• you should be able to start small and add more later
• AI should prepare and configure work, while people stay in control

I'm not really looking for feedback on a feature list. More interested in whether this underlying idea matches how other people experience business software.

If you could replace your CRM / business software tomorrow, what would stop you?

The price?
Migration?
Implementation effort?
Losing your current processes?
Getting the team to adopt another system?

Curious which one is actually the biggest blocker.

I’m using a Salient theme and WPBakery for my website. I’ve made buttons for people to download different PDF’s with text next to the buttons. When I’m in “editing mode” everything looks normal (image 1). When I save it and view it all my text shifts to the next row (Image 2).

I have my button in one column and my text in a second column.

Any help appreciated.

Just so you can feed it to your agents so that they give you a fuller overview than simply from a Youtube transcript. ;-)

Supposedly YouTube defaults to not show closed captions automatically when a user watches an embedded video if they're not logged in to YouTube. I haven't found this to be the case. Is there a query string or something to append to the end of the embed URL to have it default to 'off' when a user is not logged in?