Thread

This is half a tech support question and half a community one, but how do you set up and maintain a development environment of Expression Engine?

The key question I have in mind is one like this:

Say I add a new channel to my site. I create the channel on the development server and add some new custom fields to go with it, and edit my templates to add it to the navigation and so forth. Now I want to push this change over to the live server, but many of the changes I’ve made are in the database. I can’t just push the database over — that would overwrite my site’s content. Do I have to manually recreate the channel and fields on the live server, or do people have clever ways of automating these sorts of conversions?

Thanks in advance,
Evan

Evan,

There are indeed many approaches here, so I’ll move this over to the CodeShare Corner to get you more input.

Hey Futra,

In this recent post you’ll find a discussion on databases specifically: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/160732/

Also, if you search the archived forums you’ll find a wealth of information with regards to using configuration variables in your config file to override settings in EE. This facilitates easily moving your files between development and live sites.

If you’re using EE2 then this might be what you’re looking for: http://eeinsider.com/articles/multi-server-setup-for-ee-2/

Evan,

There are indeed many approaches here, so I’ll move this over to the CodeShare Corner to get you more input.

Unfortunately, this is really a support issue for us—we cannot maintain our ExpressionEngine websites without a strategy for making test changes. None of the workarounds presented in the linked threads even come close to addressing the problem. Is there any support EllisLab can provide on this issue (either on 1.6.x or 2.1)?