Thread

I’ve used EE on many small sites where live changes to the production site aren’t the end of the world. However, I have a new large client and am debating using EE for their site. I’m having trouble understand how EE works with dealing with backing up the site automatically on a daily basis, and how to test/push changes live.

With static sites, obviously you can test the files locally and push them live when things look good. You can also use SVN to keep track of changes to the site across an organization, an easily roll back if something broke.

This workflow works for the template files and EE source code, but since all of the content is stored in a database, is there a way to backup and save revisions of an EE database that lets you roll back at the click of a button if need be? And how do you “test” changes to a site with a staging server or something similar?

Any insight would be appreciated… thanks!

Alright, I’ve been doing a bit of reading since I posted this and have found that the way most people are doing this is to run a local MAMP install of the site, and then a live version on a server. Then using Git to control the static files and push template changes live.

This still doesn’t help me too much in terms of the database. Obviously the client is going to be making changes to the live site, otherwise a CMS is a waste of time. Is it assumed that I have to pull down the live database and overwrite into MAMP every time I want to make edits with the latest content? Are there any tools that keep MySQL databases in sync for reasons like this? It doesn’t seem to be a problem unique to EE… most CMS sites run on a combination of databases and hard template files.

I’m not sure that there’s a way to sync databases, the way you can easily version control your templates, unfortunately. I know Ryan touched on this issue in his presentation a few days ago at EECI and you can check out the presentation slides here http://gititon.masugadesign.com/