How to setup a staging environment for making site changes before going live

[mark]

Hi all,

Can anyone recommend a good setip for setting up a development and live wordpress environment ?

I want to be able to play with plugins / themes / custom themes, then migrate this onto a live server but keep the posts and users from the live system. ideally I will work on pages, and layout on the dev environment and then promote these onto live.

any suggestions I can try would be great.

I have searched on wordpress support, and they make some suggestions on running 2 version on 1 database, but I would like to the 2 separate databases, and then a tool to allow me to control what to copy up to live server.

Many thanks

Mark

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

I want to be able to play with plugins / themes / custom themes, then migrate this onto a live server but keep the posts and users from the live system.

Yes, absolutely. You should always have a staging environment.

The approach you take really depends on your setup, and who this site is for. For example, if this is for a client, a lot of people require some sort of server setup where they can be able to show their client the changes, etc, before then pushing to the live server.

However, if this is not a requirement, the easiest thing to do is just set a site up locally on your computer. If you’re using a Mac, you can use MAMP, and if you’re using Windows, you can use WAMP. These free applications essentially setup a local web server on your computer so you can setup and run a whole running WordPress site with PHP and MySQL.

Whether you’re staging site is on a local server or some other server, there’s also a plugin a lot of people have been chattering about recently that I haven’t used yet called “WP Migrate Pro” —

http://deliciousbrains.com/wp-migrate-db-pro/

From what I understand, this plugin is essentially something that you install on both sites, and it allows you to easily be working on a site in one location and then push all files and database changes to some other site (i.e. your live site).

If this all kind of overwhelming, here’s an alternative to all this. I’ve never personally used them, but there’s a popular hosting company out there that specializes in just WordPress hosting called WP Engine. They’re a little more pricey than average, shared hosting, but give you some extra security and bonuses. They have a cool feature called “One-Click Staging” —

http://wpengine.com/one-click-staging/

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