[wp-hackers] absolute URLs in plug-ins and custom types

[Otto]

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Shasta Willson <shastaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have to agree with Bryan. I consider the move to deployment (and
> maintenance of a matching testing server) one of the weakest areas of

Why are you "deploying" your content in the first place?

The notion of development->testing->production is fundamentally a
software or manufacturing notion. It doesn't make a whole heck of a
lot of sense to be forcing your writers/authors/content-creators to
use that same approach.

It seems to me that you need a separation of practices here. Your
themes/plugins/code, yes, using a deployment system like this makes
perfect sense. These can easily be developed without being tied to
URLs in any major way. Your content, however, isn't something you
should be trying to push through this sort of system. A "testing"
server should not have production content on it, ever. It's for
testing. It should have test content, content designed to test the
theme/plugin/code in question. Your authors should be writing new
content, real content, on the main site, using the main site.

(In fact, at previous jobs I've had, using real production data
anywhere but the production server was a fire-able offense, since
doing so actually broke a few laws.. Financial data in that case, but
still...)

-Otto