Search and Replace within WordPress

I was given an intriguing task today; replace a URL within every WordPress to an updated URL. It doesn’t really sound that hard you just replace Site A with Site B. But what happens when you have hundreds of posts? It’s not really that simple any more, but I found a fantastic and easy to use WordPress Plugin that took care of the job in mere seconds. Enter Search and Replace for your Database.

The plugin is called Search and Replace and when activated gives you a simple screen of checkboxes on where you want to look for your search string. You can change the content of the post, the title, the Author and several other criteria. And then as you would expect you enter the string to search for and what you want to replace it with. Boom it’s done.

This directly changes the database so the changes are permanent. As the instructions say, make a backup before you make any changes. But wow, does this tool work like a charm! It took mere minutes to make the changes.

Normally this level of trickery should be done by a DBA, but what if you don’t have access to one, or what if your data is stored on someone else’s server? This is an easy to handle the job and it saved a lot of manual labor. I’ll be keeping this plugin at the ready, I’m sure it’ll be needed again.

Search and Replace for Content

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/