Is it possible to develop locally if you have ecommerce functionality?

  • Hi,

    So far my word press website did not have any transactional data. Because I am the only person responsible for managing the content and configuration of the website, I have been making content and configuration changes (e.g. plugins) locally on my MAC and then copying all the wordpress files and complete database from the MAC over to the production server periodically (and overwrite the existing version on production server). This allows to me experiment and see how things look and feel locally without changing this on the fly on production as you can sometimes get undesired effects when experimenting!

    Now I want to add woocommerce and ecommerce functionality. This means that data on live will be constantly changing. Can I still continue to make content and configuration changes locally and release them to production without overwriting the transactional data in the live database?

    Thanks.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hello there!

    Absolutely. You can do the functional changes to your website in your local server and move those files over to production whenever you are ready. However, do not overwrite the database which will have all the order details and other transaction details in production.

    Thread Starter unstoppable6t2

    (@unstoppable6t2)

    Hi – thanks for reply. Are there any functional or configuration changes (at wordpress platform level and at plugin level) which affect the database? For example, if I update the main wordpress settings, doesn’t it change the data in database? Sorry I am not very familiar how the wordpress app is built. Thanks.

    Having the WordPress site locally is EXACTLY the same as it being on the web. There is no difference. When you move the site from local to a server, you will need to make the necessary changes to the database url’s using a search&replace script if your migration tool does not do it for you like some backup/restore plugins.

    Because Woocommerce works within its own tables you could by not changing those tables do the types of local development and file + database uploads you did before adding woocommerce. To be safe be sure to backup your database first.

    Still while this is possible, if it were me I would NOT be fooling with the database, I would upload plugin and theme etc developed files AND redo and configuration changes by repeating the backend actions tested on the localhost. AND I would still be backing up the database.

    Thread Starter unstoppable6t2

    (@unstoppable6t2)

    Thanks.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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