Question

I have a wordpress mu-site. I need to set up a test-version of it so that the client can run test on the changes we make, test the plugins with new updates etc.

Anybody who has worked with wordpress know it’s a bit off a hassle to move between servers and/or domain-names, due to the absolute paths used. Does anybody have a good solution how to create a stage-enviorment of wordpress?

Answer 1

Here’s how I do it + some adjustments I want to make:

1. Two WP installs on identical environments – dev & production
2. They each have their own FQDN
3. Version control (SVN in this case) to handle merges from dev to production
4. When merging, I don’t ever merge database changes. I only merge code, and modify any of the domain specific things during the merge (which really should only be in the DB.)
5. Recreate any DB changes needed during deployment

There are other ways to do it, but they often require changing the hosts file or access to internal systems. So if you want to be able to show an external client a site, then those methods aren’t likely to work.

I also sometimes copy the DB back from production to dev, and just do a find & replace for the FQDN.

You can also dev locally and use the above listed method for staging only.