[wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

[Eric Mann]

>
> No, but that's not the same thing at all. A dev/staging/production
> environment is something used by a company to create a continual
> development process. It's not the same as a demo or test site that you
> would be showing clients. You're mixing ideas here.


Careful.  This depends *a lot* on who you are, how you develop, and who
you're developing for.  As Jonathan mentioned, it seems there are different
groups doing things in different ways.

For Example:

In my day job, I use a dev/staging/production setup as part of my normal
workflow.  The dev environment is on my local machine - local code, local
db, etc.  I map a domain to my dev environment with my hosts file so that
URLs work appropriately.

Staging is on a remote server.  Separate database, separate copy of the
system.  When I get to a point in my development cycle where I think I'm
ready to go live, I push out from dev to staging and test things out.

Staging != dev ... The staging env is a 100% copy of my production
environment so I can make sure nothing will break.  When I'm ready and sure
it's stable, I push from staging to production.

Alternatively ...

With WordPress it's somewhat different because *I'm working for someone else
*.  The dev environment is the same.  My staging environment is hopefully
set up the same way ... but that's where things change a bit.  I don't own
the production machine - my client does.  I don't control it - my client
does.  So I mimic it as closely as I can with my staging system and use it
to serve up a "beta" of the finished product.

When I'm finished, think it's stable, and the client is done tweaking
content, I migrate everything from staging to production.  This is where
relative URLs would help since the client needs to see both the staging
build and the production build at the same time without flipping their hosts
file back and forth.