Thread

I’m close to pushing my first EE site live (hurrah).... what Im wondering is what is the best way to develop going forward. 

My client and members will be making changes to content so if I want to make changes to both templates and EE configuration presumably I’ll need to :

- backup the current prd database
- mirror it locally

then :

- either prevent client/members from adding content whilst I make changes *or*
- make changes then merge with current database

If Im modifying just templates then this is really easy - I dont really have to worry about the db so much. However if Im making changes to channel/fields structure and EE settings then presumably these will affect the database.

Im really keen to figure out how best to manage this !!

Ive just been looking at GIT-ftp which I think might help with pushing only changed files into production. Im similarly keen to hear about good staging strategies… does it make sense to have a copy of my site as a staging environment on the same server but under a subdomain and using a separate db ?

Any hints/tips/pointers awould be great ! 😊

Thanks !

Did you ever find a good solution for this? I’m learning that this is one of EE’s greatest weaknesses probably warranting a separate forum just to talk about deployment.

I’ve been reading several articles on it, but the direction I’m heading is a hybrid approach between Viget’s Doug Avery and team (http://viget.com/inspire/expressionengine-on-multiple-machines) and potentially using the EE Master Config (https://github.com/focuslabllc/ee-master-config).

I’m using Beanstalk as my remote git repo from which I have auto deployment set up to production (no staging server yet although that might be a good idea if more people start working on the site—I’m the only one right now).

What I’m struggling with is how to manage the DB as well. I see that Doug exports his and imports before/after each push/pull. In the comments of the Viget thread above they talk about using git to merge the SQL files from the export. That freaks me out…not sure if I trust it. Some folks also talked about using Navicat to help manage the DB merging process.

I saw this presentation by Erik Reagan that talks a bit about scheme flowing to production and content flowing from production and a lot of the folks reference Navicat in the comments: http://focuslabllc.com/blog/eeci2011-environments-and-version-control-in-expressionengine

I suppose I’ll be looking into Navicat….