The only potentially helpful related thread was closed out because it had no replies …
Long story short, we moved our website and I was unable to export any of the forms prior to this move. Now the time has come, and we need one of those forms that took ages to perfect because of the logic behind it. Anyway, I’ve tried copying over a bunch of stuff and using the [VaultPress] instructions for importing a backup. Also copied over the entire sql folder from that backup and imported it via PHPmyAdmin to a staging site (random domain) so I can try to get in and export the form.
No matter what I do, I cannot get anything to show up under “Forms” when on the WordPress dashboard; it’s completely empty. I can confirm that there is data in the tables and I found the one I’m looking for, but how do I get it to display? There must be something here that I’m missing, I feel like we are so close… this is sort of an emergency as I need this form by Monday afternoon. There really needs to be a better way to do this.
Thanks in advance for any insight that anyone may have.
I got it. Absolutely absurdly complicated, but here’s how I was able to restore an old website onto a new domain temporarily, all so I could login to the WP dashboard and export some important GravityForms:
-From your website backup (if you don’t at least have this, I can’t help you) get the folders that you want. I moved over the entire “wp-content” folder and the “sql” folder.
-Make sure your new domain already has a fresh WP install; this part is easy from your cPanel or via FTP, etc.
-I then accessed the new domain root via FTP and transferred over all the folders mentioned in the first step, overwriting anything along the way.
-I used command prompt to access the folder on my desktop containing all of the SQL files/tables from the previous database and ran the following command to get them into a single file: [in directory] *copy /b .sql newFileName.sql which takes everything in that directory with a .sql extension and combines it into one nice file.
-Access PHPmyAdmin within your host, locate the new site that you just installed WP on, and import your newly created .sql file (the one containing all of the SQL files).
-Now, as you can imagine, there are tons of conflicts happening at this point, so many in fact that I couldn’t even load the admin login page to get into the WP dashboard to see if I could access my old forms.
-Find the SQL table called “wp_options” and edit the first two links containing URLs to match the URL of your new website.
-What finally solved this, was going over to http://wordpress.org and grabbing a fresh install of WP and extracting it somewhere so you can grab a specific folder.
-From the fresh download/extraction, grab the entire “wp-includes” folder and via FTP upload the entirety of that folder to your new site, overwriting everything in the process.
-When it’s finished the NEW site will now accept the OLD login credentials and after inputting those credentials, I was finally able to access the WP dashboard, and all of my old GravityForms were there.
-Exported all forms, and then deleted the entire directory for the new website because it only existed for this purpose.
There may be a step or two missing in here, however, I was unsure if those particular steps actually contributed to getting this to work. If anyone else tries it and runs into issues, let me know and I can try to assist.