I’m in the process of migrating a rather large site using EE from one server to another and technically things are working fine. I have been able to move all the files and the database over and view the new site fine.

http://76.12.39.4

Problem is, I’m noticing that there is now a strange variable being added at the end of all the links “?phpMyAdmin=acbca740c3845e487a644f431cc4c937”. I thought that perhaps this was being added dynamically by EE to all the links but when I looked at the template files through EE I see that it has been added in the code to the end of pretty much all of my links. Not sure where this came from because it’s not in the current site but somewhere while moving the database this got inserted in the records.

Any idea where this came from?

That is a session ID - you can turn off sessions by using cookies only, in Admin -> Security and Session Preferences.

Right, and that’s what I have done. What I’m saying is that somewhere along the transfer that string has been inserted in my template files physically. I’m not sure how it got there and I would like it to go away. Is there a special way I have to export the database data for migration or anything like that?

Well, it’s starting to look like the issue might be related to the phpMyAdmin running on their current server. When I go to export the database as a file it is adding that to the end of my url’s. But, if I don’t export the data as a file if I just view the sql then it doesn’t.

This is totally bizarre.

Actually, I think that may be a search URL and not a session ID. Still it shouldn’t write out information like that, you’re using PHPMyAdmin for the database dump? 

That really is very strange. What version and build of EE are you running?

I’m running 1.5.2 and yes I’m using phpMyAdmin to export the data. The really strange thing is that the url’s and stuff are fine as long as I don’t export the data as a file. If I just look at the content it doesn’t have that trailing thing.

Anyway, I have manually moved over the content from four or five tables bypassing the phpMyAdmin export and everything appears to be working now. I think it’s something weird with my phpMyAdmin.

Things are good now, thanks for the help!

That is so incredibly odd, though.  Thanks for posting your solution and following up =)

I just had the same thing happen. This post reminded me that it’s gotten me before. When you export a database containing HTML content using PHPMyAdmin these values are appended. You can also do a find and replace in your SQL file.

It also inserts

into forms.

If you’re doing Find & Replace in your exported SQL to correct this, you can also update all of your current URLs to your new server’s URLs rather than chasing them all down in the CP.

Mark

I would recommend being extremely careful with search and replace in the database - many preferences, including some URLs, are stored in a serialized array. If you are not extremely proficient with those, then you are more likely to do more damage than good.  You can always use config.php overrides as an easier way to migrate sites.

Yeah, I just learned that. I still recommend purging ?phpMyAdmin…. using Find & Replace, but swapping the URL kills a bunch of stuff.

Some sort of migration assistant that would update ALL instances of the root URL would be nice. Going through weblog by weblog to update that is killing me. Even if I miss some that don’t directly impact the site, I don’t want my client to see my dev URLs anywhere. (I typically build sites on a staging URL off my own server, and then deploy to their server.)

Thanks,
Mark

You can always post a feature request for such a thing. =)

Housekeeping.