Thread

Hi,

I wanted to ask if the new MSM would be good to set up a testing/staging environment for a site.  Can a site set up on a subdomain or directory share the same weblogs and templates so it can effectively mirror the production site?

Thanks

Greetings, fodney—

The MSM is more for managing distinct sites. You can split out a current site into multiple sites, but there is no easy import path back.  Someone may correct me if I’m wrong here, but I do not think it is the appropriate tool in this scenario.  You could certainly create a development site then split that off into a new site, but the import is on site creation only.

It seems like maybe a combination of variables in path.php and different folders on the server would be a better way to accomplish a staging area for content, which seems to be what this question is about?

As far as a staging area for developing new templates is concerned, I’ve been wondering about this too.  It is easy to create a new template group duplicating an old one, but could one, for example do the following?:

have a template group called group1
duplicate that template group into a template group called group2

do links and things using a path.php variable (production site links use group1, test site links use group2)

when group2 is ready, delete group1 and duplicate group2 into a new group1

I know this may be out of scope for the presales forum, but if it turns out this should be possible, I may go do it, and write up a howto that we could link to here, which seems like it could really help the presales forum.