Keeping testing and live servers in synch?

  • I have a website at https://www.domain.com that has a WordPress installation at https://www.domain.com/blog. I recently redesigned and rebuilt the site using WordPress for the entire thing.

    I did this using a second copy of WP installed on https://dev.domain.com. When that was first created I copied the database from the original installation to have content to work with.

    Since then, the live site has had more content added (mainly Posts and Links). While the dev version has had mostly Pages added and a few plugins I think.

    Is there an easy way to merge these together? It’s pretty safe to say that in any particular case, the newer content should be kept.

    And going forward, I’d like to keep this development version up so I can test plugins and theme changes there first. Is there a recommended way for keeping two sites in synch? Or will it all have to be done on a case-by-case basis?

    Thanks!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter dansinch

    (@dansinch)

    No one has an ideas on this? Any help would be much appreciated.

    Thanks

    It is situation specific. Two OS’s you haven’t specified, two SQL DB also unknown, two versions of WP, versions unknown. You can merge he blogs with WXR import export but that may have some issues with duplicates (I’ve never tried) and it is less than automatic.

    If you happen to have near identical OS’s and MySQL DB versions and the server runs Linux and allows rsync in and out. You can look at that (no point asking here, it’s a Linux thing). I used to do mysqldumps and ryncs to my backup server but it’s not easy to set up and test.

    You might also use some sort of RSS grab and update but I’m not aware of an automated way to do it so that involves a lot programming skill. And if one version of WP is upgraded and the syncs fail or the DB layout changes or the host was down.

    Thread Starter dansinch

    (@dansinch)

    Sorry… the OS and DB versions should be exactly the same. Both sites are actually on the same server, just different domains. The main site is domain.com and the dev site is dev.domain.com

    I actually realized that once I push the new site live, I can probably just hook them up to the same database. But right now, they’re using separate DBs.

    So, really I just need to do a one time synch up to merge the DBs and keep all the newest stuff. I think all I really need to do is import the posts, comments and links/blogroll from the live site. Everything else can stay the same.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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