HI,
we are soon going to go live with the EE site - been a bit of a long haul with a lot of things needed doing both n and outside of EE.
When live, we will be wanting to maintain our development area for future developments of the EE site. With this in mind, we need the facility to synchronise stories between both areas (so if anyone enters a story in the live site, we can pull that into the development site).
The development site will also be where we test and check any heavy lifting before going live. This “heavy lifting” will include:
• New areas of the site we do not want to expose to the pubic (or even be in danger of exposing).
• New pages/areas whose layout IN the template will need to be previewed and approved by management prior to going live.
• New template amendments.
• External PHP code functionality.
So, what we need to do is effectively make changes which can be viewed from within templates, and then move those from the preview area live the live area.
So far, I’ve not been able to figure this out - I’ve certainly not seen anything which will do what we want. We will very likely be writing our own code to do all of this, so we will need to know what is safe to muck about with in the EE database structure, and what is off limits. We will want to move files (templates, image uploads etc.), as well as database entries (weblogs, new template additions, etc. etc.) without screwing up settings (such as the URL settings).
So, has anyone done this before? Any pointers, information, etc. would be useful to us.