I have a question in general about having a QA and Production site.
We currently have a QA and Production setup. Creating and modifying new templates is a breeze. The trouble comes in with the dynamics of other segments. Any new ‘Custom Channel Fields’, new ‘Channels’, and any published ‘Entries’ all seem to need to be re-entered in the production side. This is either due to them not existing, or in the entry case, fear of duplicating or over-writing primary keys.
It appears that nobody has really established a “good” way of achieving this with EE due to the inherent issues and possibilities of duplicating or having offset primary keys in the DB. Is there any way to run a QA site along side a production site in which the production(live) site can be in use by the customer or multiple users while the QA server is used for any “big” changes or new design needs? It just seems that once you throw in the mix of MSM, freeform, blog entries, etc… that a live site has an increasing number of id’s that the qa site will not have thus making it not an option of exporting and importing the DB.
Has anyone had any luck in achieving a side-by-side QA/Production setup?
Thanks in advance all.
[Mod Edit: Moved to the General Discussion forum]