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Wordpress Development VS Production Environments

I am about to use WordPress as CMS with a lot of customization, but my question is, how should I sync development to production?

Assuming WordPress is not used, a typical development cycle is to develop the pages locally, and create the DB scripts. Then when everything is ready, it is posted to the site. And then again, more db and code changes, then only the changes are updated/applied, and so on.

Now, with WordPress, you get all the great features (one example is blogging, comments, almost ready CMS ...etc). However deployment is a pain! Ideally, I would rather keep my typical development cycle described above. Therefore I am going to be implementing WordPress locally (from wordpress.org) and then pushing the changes to my production server.

So, assuming that I create a new page in WordPress locally (I will never create pages on the server, all locally, I will find a way to disable wp-admin for the server), a number of files are created. This is not a problem so far. HOWEVER, if I want to add content to that newly created page, that content is saved to my local database. Even though that content is a database change, it is considered (from my point of view) a new change that should be pushed to server rather than add that content via the live server (because that content is considered static, it is not a blog post or a comment, it is a static page).

Now, that new page content is saved to the DB, and therefore, the DB will have changes done on my local machine that I should push to the server along with the files that I will FTP to the server.

My questions are:

  1. Is this approach correct? If not, what do you suggest

  2. What is the best way to find database diffs? What is a tool to use? Does MySQL Workbench provide something like that? I intend to use that tool to find diffs and then generate an update script for the DB. The reason for this question is I normally make the changes myself, and I know how to track them, but now, those DB changes are generated by WordPress and I need to reverse engineer them to find out which changes are made.

  3. Assuming I got step 2 to work, is there anything in that script that should be modified? Such as server names? Does WordPress hard-code server names for example?

So to summarize and give you more information about my development environment, I use XAMPP for development on Windows 7, with PHP and MySQL setup. I also use Mercurial for source control. As mentioned above, I will use WordPress as part of the solution and I intend to use it to help me create a CMS solution. I will use it locally for page generation, and disable that feature for online (keeping online for blog posts and similar entries only). I am doing that so as to keep things in-sync. If I create a page locally, some data is saved to the DB. Now, how do I sync/upload?

Thanks.

Solution

  • OK, after further investigation, here is what I concluded.

    1. All theme development should be version-controlled
    2. All plugin development should be version-controlled
    3. Content of pages and posts are not part of the development porcess, this is contect and should only be backed up.

    This way, you do not need to worry about DB changes ...etc.

    Hope this helps everyone.