[wp-hackers] WP Development & Production Sites

[Andrew Gray]

I think that many on this discussion are missing the critical issue for the Dev -> Stage -> Production process.

It is not the URLs stored in the post content.   Those are trivial to replace with a filter of post content. 

There are two big issues with deploying a website from development to a live site

1. The serialized arrays, plugin paths and other places the URL is stored
2. A way to export or deploy new pages, menus, plugin configuration, etc from development to production

Both of these issues need to be solved for Wordpress to fit well into a iterative development process.

Having to manually find replace though a DB, then manually recreate pages and configure plugins on a live website during a deployment is stressful, can be not automated and is not a reliable way to deploy a site.

Most of my post deployment issues come from forgetting to check some box in a plugin, or set the template of a page correctly.  A way to export the plugin settings, activation status, pages etc and some sort of best practice for storing URLs is the first step towards making this process smoother and more reliable for those of us who can not just DB dump the site and replace the live content.    

thanks,

Andrew





> 
> 
> I disagree with Peter in that WordPress already does what some would
> consider "unnecessary processing" and what one considers unnecessary
> processing might not be to another person. Setting this argument aside
> completely and looking entirely at weighing the options, I would say that it
> isn't worth changing. The problems with absolute URLs are really esoteric to
> those who are developing and those that move sites. The majority of users
> have no problems with absolute URLs and changing to relative will require a
> lot of work with testing, development and correcting for bugs found with
> edge cases.
>