WordPress Sandbox on the VPS — full plan

How to bring oscarstreeacademy.org.uk onto the VPS via .wpress import, run WordPress in Docker, verify the local install is functional, and snapshot every page as static HTML for the dist.

Approach

1. Export the live WordPress site using the All-in-One WP Migration plugin as a .wpress file
2. Copy the .wpress file to the VPS via scp
3. Set up WordPress + MariaDB in Docker on the VPS
4. Use wp-cli to import the .wpress file
5. Fix all the issues (URLs, plugins, missing posts, etc.) that the import surfaces
6. Snapshot each page as static HTML for distribution

Outcomes (achieved)

• ✅ 1.88GB WPRESS file downloaded from VPS to Mavis cloud sandbox
• ✅ Extracted locally: 64,644 files, 1.7GB
• ✅ Local WordPress replica built with PHP 8.2 + MariaDB 10.11 + Apache 2.4
• ✅ SQL import with 138 tables, 290 posts, 16 pages
• ✅ Elementor plugins activated, all pages rendering
• ✅ Recovered dropped posts (76 home, 101 team)
• ✅ All 16 pages now accessible at wp-oscar.freshvibeapps.com

Issues found and fixed

• AI1WM silently dropped 32 posts on import (mostly revisions, but 2 content posts that we recovered)
• URL hardcoded references to oscarstreeacademy.org.uk in elementor_data — replaced with wp-oscar.freshvibeapps.com
• Plugin auto-updates were causing "update failed" messages — disabled site-wide
• dFlip Lite plugin had a PHP bug — patched manually

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