I am involved in a redesign of a client’s website and during development the client has been adding posts/pages and working with existing plugins that were on the site.
I have made a new theme and added new plugins including plugin settings to the new design. My question is how can I pull the current production database to my development without overwriting what I’ve developed. I was looking at the wp-db-migrate-pro plugin to migrate only certain tables but there are some complications. the wp-posts tables includes navigation menus and pages and if I were to pull that table I would destroy the pages and menus I have created. In addition there are plugin settings I need from the production site but pulling the wp-options table would overwrite the plugins and their settings I have on development.
Is there an easy deployment strategy I could follow to grab data while not overwriting my own? This article https://deliciousbrains.com/avoiding-wordpress-database-merging/ talks about it but the two strategies suggested aren’t really viable for me as they are difficult to write and manage.
If the only changes you have made on your development site are theme and plugin related, those are all file system changes. Pulling in the DB from the current production site would not overwrite your files.
Make a fresh backup first but unless you’ve modified the DB there is nothing to worry about.