Using Development and Prodcution Servers

  • I’ve read the posts how to Move WordPress (WP), but this doesn’t seem to be my situation and I’m surprised I can’t find anything specific to this topic so hence the post.

    Call me old school but I normally do development locally in a development environment then push changes to the production servers after testing for bugs. In past we’d have development, QA and then Production evironments. But, the WP way seems you just have one environment for everything and thats it.

    Obviously, I’m not talking about actual posts, but more or less CSS updates, Template modification, Plug-in develompment and other larger site wide changes that we’d like not to have public during development.

    Any insight from someone that has this type of development strategy is greatly appreciated.

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

  • I’m not talking about actual posts, but more or less CSS updates, Template modification, Plug-in develompment and other larger site wide changes that we’d like not to have public during development.

    I do all my theme development on a dev environment. Once I have something I like I upload the theme directory to the production server. Same for plugins.

    Simple as that! Am I misunderstanding the question though?

    Don’t get too caught up with the content of the site — that’s all in the database, you don’t have to worry about it when you’re moving files around.

    Thread Starter josemalone

    (@josemalone)

    Chris,

    Thank you.

    OK, I guess I was just assuming this was in the db as well. So even if I do the edits within WP Admin. I can copy the theme folder over. For plug-ins. Don’t you have to re-install them? Or just copying over makes them active? Or, I guess I’d have to install the plugin on production and then copy over the edits?

    Again, appreciate the insight.

    Jose

    As a proper developer aware of Dev / QA / Prod environments, surely you’d not be editing in a textbox on a web page?!? ??

    Plugins are like themes. If you have a plugin activated in prod and overwrite it with an updated version the plugin is still active, just now running the updated version.

    Now, if the plugin isn’t active in prod and you’ve been testing it in Dev then you’ll have to be sure to not only copy the plugin filtes to prod but configure it there as well. Some plugins make it really easy to locate any associated db tables or records but it is usually easier/quicker to just activate the new plugin in prod and then visit the plugin’s config page (if applicable).

    In other words, “it depends” ??

    Thread Starter josemalone

    (@josemalone)

    Thanks Chris.

    Guess I’ll just dive in. ;-0

    Jose

    Chris,

    Do you not use Subversion (or any other) revision control in the middle of all this? Are you not concerned with the ability to roll back?

    Thanks,
    Brian

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