Dev and Production WordPress Installs – How

Hi,

Do you mean just content or theme modifications?

I have separate installs for theme development, and ideally I try to keep both databases in sync. I’m not too worried about content and posts. But typically I keep the categories, plugins, etc. in sync.

So I dev stuff on dev, test, and then all I usually have to do is copy over the theme to live.

The company I work for manage this via Subversion (SVN), so I have a local copy of the themes I can test locally. I copy to dev, then livestage. Once completely tested, the Operations team here copy the themes live, I then commit my changes to the repository for other devs to download my changes to their local installs (this is how some of the bigger software companies manage stuff).

Hope this is helpful.

Harry

Thanks harmck.

I’m actually talking about the actual content/posts on dev/prod.

I do use the boxes in a typical dev/prod setup like you describe as well (I also have a first-stage local version just because it’s faster =p). We also use Mercurial to handle our stuff. =)

You would regularly have to replicate the database between environments, might take a little bit of time to setup such scripts, i.e do the db_dump, transfer, import, replace any variable differences between environments. This could be done via a shell script if you’re comfortable with writing them, otherwise it would be a manual process.

Not sure of any tools that do this, but I’m sure they exist. I don’t use any myself.

You could use something like rsync to ensure the uploads folder is kept up to date between environments.

Apart from that there is the wp xml file export for the content. But that may not work entirely, you’d have to replicate over any media etc.

I don’t keep my dev environment in sync. Hopefully the above is food for thought. It’s how I would approach it, though I haven’t tried it.

Good luck with it though.

Yeah, that’s the problem. Since the prod box has a forum and other various things, a regular easy database sync isn’t really an option. =/

Well, if you have a separate db for wordpress, it shouldn’t effect anything else.

I mentioned the forums, but there are a lot of additionally bits that change on the WordPress end once it hits production. It gets messy.

I’m thinking of moving content development to the production box again, so I’m just looking for any examples that do or don’t.