If you are planning to develop WordPress Plugins or Themes, you might need many changes to your testing site. Every time you make any changes to your code you need to retest all the settings and features to make sure you are not breaking any functionality.
Even when people report issues and defects with the plugin or theme, you may want to set the site accordingly to replicate those issues. This will help in accurately identifying the root cause of the issue. Once solved, the same installation can be used to debug another issue. We need to just reset the WordPress installation and set it up according to the new issue.
WP Reset WordPress Plugin
This is where WP Reset WordPress plugin becomes useful. You can reset your WordPress installation with a click of a button.
Though there are some inbuilt precautions so that you don’t reset the installation by mistake but after those, it is just a click of a button to reset the WordPress.
The WordPress Plugin is available free of cost on the WordPress repository and you can install it from your dashboard.
What Does It Reset?
WP Reset WordPress Plugin deletes every modification done to your site and brings it back to the fresh installation. This includes all your posts, pages, custom post types, users and media entries.
It will also reset the WordPress database and delete all entries from WordPress default tables. Along with the default tables, it will also delete all the other tables which are created by WordPress Plugins as long as they are using the same prefix as WordPress tables.
It doesn’t remove any files from your installation but removes the entry from the database. In case you have uploaded image files, those will be present in the upload folder but will not be accessible from the WordPress dashboard. In a similar way it also does not touch your plugin or theme files. So, all your WordPress Plugins and media files will be saved.
What Happens to Logged in User?
As mentioned above, it resets all the WordPress tables and only leaves the default data in it. So, what happens if you have added few users with different roles?
It will keep an admin account and delete all other user ID’s from the WordPress tables. The current logged in user will be logged out and need to login again. The first Admin account which is available in the table, will be kept and others will get deleted.
If you are not testing with many users, you should not be worrying about it. Otherwise, you might have to do some back and forth tricks to figure out the correct user ID to login.
My suggestion will be to use a single Admin ID and assign other roles to WordPress users. This way you will always know which user ID you should use to login the site.
How to use it?
Once you install the WordPress Plugin, you will get a new menu option under Tools. You can click on that to start the reset process.
Once you are there, you will see some options which you can set to take actions accordingly. For Example, if you would want to activate the same WordPress theme after the reset, you can just check the box.
One of the things selected by default is reactivating WP Reset Plugin, so after all the activity, it will activate the plugin again. If you want the same for other plugins, you need to select the other option.
You need to type the word “reset” in the confirmation field before clicking on the reset button. This is an additional security measure which makes sure you do not reset the WordPress by mistake. Type “reset” and click on the button to reset the WordPress.
WordPress CLI Support
All the functions which are available through GUI are also available through command line interface. So, if you automate your testing using any industry standard tools, you can use them to reset the WordPress before executing the test cases.
If you are developing a theme or plugin, you should look for automated functional testing. This makes sure after each change you can easily rerun all of your test cases to make sure all of the functionality is working fine. You can create a generic script to reset the WordPress based on your test cases and use the CLI commands to do that.
Where Should You Use It?
As mentioned above, it’s more of a development tool vs a WordPress Plugin which you will use on your live site. I would not even recommend it to install on your live sites as it can reset them if not careful.
This plugin is only useful if you are developing with WordPress and want different configurations to test. So, rather than resetting the WordPress manually each time, you can use this plugin to easily revert all the changes. It can also help in automated test setups with the help of Command Line Integrations.
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