Changing the home and siteurl in your wp_options table is not enough unfortunately. You will still have your post content with your non-localhost URL (http://www.thesite.com) causing your website to not display properly on your localhost. You should have the wp_options table on your localhost copy. Everything should be intact. To make sure exported your database … Read more
Yes. I just did an experiment on my own site to verify that changing those settings will redirect between www and non-www as you specify.
All of your links in the menu are pointing to http://www.magnetmediafilmsinc.com/ which may indicate the search and replace script you used didn’t do the search and replace properly/completely. The other links on the index page are pointing to http://iamshawnrce.com/demo/casestudies/?p=postID which I would expect to see. Plugins and caches can also cause this problem. Make sure … Read more
This might not be the issue, but I would install the All In One WP Security & Firewall plugin by “Tips and Tricks HQ” and use that plugin the check your file and directory permissions. Often times file permissions or also file ownership gets messed up in migrations. Seeing as you have deleted all plugins … Read more
Yes. You can export the content of the site and import it into a new, single-site installation with the WordPress Importer plugin.
See Codex for running a development copy of wordpress. You can make all the changes you want on the blog without affecting the production site by testing out new themes/etc which is what it seems like you’re looking to do. http://codex.wordpress.org/Running_a_Development_Copy_of_WordPress#WordPress_2.7_-_3.0
use WordPress export option and after that use import on the second site How to Export and Import a WordPress Blog
The wp_posts table has a guid field, which should be globally unique, and survive migrations. It is formed by taking the initial post URL, and never changed after that (when you change the title, change the website address, or migrate the posts). This should be pretty safe to base your synchronisation code on.
I use the plugin Duplicator. This will copy all files and databases in one package, migrate the databases,… You can even set up filters to exclude/include certain files. It takes 4-5 minutes to migrate everything to localhost and vice-versa.
See Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex These are typical queries to run in phpmyadmin to change URLs, but you may also have serialized data in widget and theme options that will have to be changed, too: UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://olddomain.com’, ‘http://newdomain.com’) WHERE option_name=”home” OR option_name=”siteurl”; UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://olddomain.com’,’http://newdomain.com’); … Read more