Thread

Greetings,

I’ve done a handful of small EE sites, but there’s something I never really understand. With a live site, if I need to add a template, make changes to an existing template or the CSS, or do a redesign of some pages, I never really know the best way to go about it.

The thought of copying the site to a development server and then copying it back seems like a big pain (I never find it totally smooth to move a site from one server to another), and then that doesn’t take into account changes being made to the live site during the redevelopment period.

What I wind up doing (these are small sites) is making alt versions of templates and CSS (if necessary) to test them out, then when things are all approved replacing the old versions with the new, but this doesn’t strike me as the best way to do this.

I’d be happy to hear how other people approach this issue!

That’s the way I always done it as well. Simple, quick, effective. What don’t you like about it?

Thanks for the comment — I’m glad to hear that you do it that way, too.

It’s not that I don’t like that method particularly, I was just thinking maybe there was a more “proper” way to go about it that I hadn’t figured out — there are a lot of things that take me a while to figure out!

Somehow I remember hearing about people mirroring a site somewhere or something like that…. but I’ll continue on this way with more confidence now.

Thanks!

Oh..“proper”. 😉

While plenty of blog posts and conference talks will present workflow-related topics with messages like “if you aren’t working this way you are doing it wrong” the truth is there is no “right” or “wrong” way to develop EE sites.

If you got the work done, didn’t take the site down, have happy clients and got paid then sleep easy.

Other developers have gone to GIT-based workflows, but the approach adds too many moving parts for me with not enough benefit for the trouble. I’m not working on sites that big, nor on multi-developer teams so the approach you outlined continues to work for me.

Just keep in mind this is one curmudgeons perspective..😉

If you got the work done, didn’t take the site down, have happy clients and got paid then sleep easy.

Thanks! Simple works much better for me than complicated.