This is a more general question about WP website best practices.
An issue I encounter with many of my clients is maintaining two identical WP installs (staging and production). They insist on seeing changes before they go live. However, with WP’s structure, that would involve constantly clearing and re-importing databases in addition to updating theme files.
Is there a simple answer out there that would allow me to maintain two identical WP websites with as few headaches as possible?
Thank you in advance for your help!
Jake
You might be interested in this Q/A in the FAQ category:
How to: Easily Move a WordPress Install from Development to Production?
Server mirroring/migration is a pain because there are so many pieces that might (or might not) need to be synced. PHP code (core, plugins, themes) is easy enough to keep straight. But when it comes to data, it gets messier. You’ve got your content, user accounts, and lots of option settings. Some of which will come from your plugins and themes, and which are typically not namespaced in any way that lets us manage them well. Plus, some of the options are ‘hardcoded’ to your hostname/URL, and internal links (such as for media) are hardcoded based on the configured URL, as well.
I keep hoping that over time, we’ll come up with some changes to core that will help mitigate at least some of these issues.
I found this article on WPtuts informative:
How to Sync A Local & Remote WordPress Blog Using Version Control
http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-sync-a-local-remote-wordpress-blog-using-version-control/
Hello this was something I needed to do as well, only I wanted it automated.
I wanted a mirror of domain http://www.example1.com to http://www.example2.com.
This mirror needed to be fully functional, so that means all the URL’s need to be changed from example1.com to example2.com in the database.
This needs to be done so that all the links and internal URLs point to example2.com on the mirrored domain.
All uploaded data needed to be synchronized from http://www.example1.com to http://www.example2.com
What I did was create three scripts to do just that for me and I never need to worry about it, it’s self maintained!
This software is free open source and available on Github.
Here is a post on the process used to Automating the Mirroring of WordPress to Another Domain