Sorry to hear you had trouble with exporting/importing your directory! I don;t think I’ve ever encountered an issue where the categories were not properly migrated.
Question, of the categories not migrated, were those categories attached to at least one entry? If they were not, then I could see them not being exported. In that case, I would recommend exporting the categories using the free export tools first and then importing them into the new site. Only the category export/import tools will transfer categories which have not been attached to any entries. I hope that is clear and makes sense!
As for the preferred method, I prefer doing it via SQL dumps. Here’s the steps I do:
To start, Connections should not be installed on the destination site. If you have installed it, uninstall it and then use phpMyAdmin to drop the {wpdb_prefix}connections* from the WordPress database. There are 13 of them.
First, go to the Connections Tools admin page and export the settings.
Now, login into the source site and go to the Connections Settings admin page. Disable the FULLTEXT search option
Next, log into the source site’s phpMyAdmin and export those 13 tables as a SQL file. Use the quick export or default export options. I forget what the exact terminology is.
Log into the destination site phpMyAdmin and import that SQL file.
After the import is complete, you will need to change the wpdb_prefix of the imported table to match the wpdb_prefix of the destination site.
Now, log into the source site via FTP and navigate to the ../wp-content/uploads/ folder. You will find a folder named connections-images. Download that entire folder.
Next log into the destination site via FTP and navigate ../wp-content/uploads/ and upload the connections-images you just downloaded.
Now you can install and activate Connections on the destination site.
Import the settings on the Connections Tools admin page.
Lastly, toggle the FULLTEXT option on the Connections Settings admin page under the Search tab. Do this by disabling it and saving the setting, then enabling it and saving the setting. This will ensure the FULLTEXT indexes are created if the db supports it.
It sounds like a lot but it actually pretty quick with most time spent on logging in and out of the various part of the two sites.
As for bulk delete, if you’re comfortable working directly with the database, just do a truncate on all the {wpdb_prefix}connections* tables.
I hope this helps, please let me know.
