Updating an Existing, Live Site

  • Hello,

    I am planning on using WordPress for the blog portion of my website.

    For my non-WP site, I frequently make changes by building a new application on my local machine and then deploying it to my production machine.

    Is this work flow also done with WordPress (ie: make changes locally or on some other server and then deploy them to your live site)?

    I was thinking of using the Duplicator plugin for this but from reading the documentation, I don’t understand how live changes would be preserved (eg: If posts are added to my live site while I am working on a new update on my local machine, then when I upload the new version, the posts won’t be shown. That is, I upload the new version with its database, thus loosing any changes made to the database in the interim). Is this correct? Or did I misunderstand how this plugin works?

    How do you make changes to a live site in WordPress? Say I wanted to change a function in my theme’s functions.php file but didn’t want to make that change on the live site.

    Thank you

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Frankly, this is not easy.

    I’ve been keeping my eye on this project, but haven’t yet tried it: https://versionpress.net/

    For PHP related stuff, I test locally, and deploy via sftp or git. It’s the database that’s hard, as you noted.

    Thread Starter theyuv

    (@theyuv)

    I see, thanks.

    1) What is normal practice then for updating live production WordPress sites?
    Is it just not too common for updates to be made to the DB? As far as I see it (I’m new to WP), every time I add something like a Widget or Menu it gets stored in the DB…So it seems pretty common.

    2) So you version your php stuff. And then when it comes time to move it to production, how do you ensure a smooth transition between old and new files (ie: if you remove then add then there’s a brief period where the files are missing)?

    Maybe WordPress sites require less maintenance and I am overthinking this since I haven’t deployed the live site yet.

    Any link would be helpful.

    Thanks.

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    1. I don’t have a good way to deal with content. New/modified content is done on the live site and is not moved up from the dev site.

    2. The time to do a git-pull or push stuff via sftp is minimal, so I don’t worry about it too much.

    There are more formal dev/stage/prod processes but I’m a single dev, not a large agency and am generally not in a continuous development cycle once a site goes into production. Hosts like Pantheon and WP-Engine enforce stricter processes.

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