If you are using Pantheon for hosting it turns out to be trivial to do this as a test (they call it dev), stage (they call it test) and production server are built into their platform along with tools to manage moving data and files around. Plus with Pantheon you get easy but optional Git … Read more
You might be interested in this Q/A in the FAQ category: How to: Easily Move a WordPress Install from Development to Production? Server mirroring/migration is a pain because there are so many pieces that might (or might not) need to be synced. PHP code (core, plugins, themes) is easy enough to keep straight. But when … Read more
Note: This is more a comment than an answer, but I wanted to format it nicely. I don’t know about recording, but I imagine something like the following in SQL could work. INSERT INTO DB1.Tbl1 ( id, x, y ) SELECT DB2.Tbl1.id, DB2.Tbl1.x, DB2.Tbl1.y FROM DB2.Tbl1 ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE x=x, y=y; Beware, this is … Read more
Any difference between dev and prod is bad. Here is what I do: Have a different ip for dev server (Whether internal, external, or on local computer is unimportant) — but dev server must be the exact same setup (see bottom paragraph) Change the hosts file (see here) (on yours or a testing computer or … Read more
It’s best to just log errors to the server and then use bash or a server script that supports email and error analysis (instead of PHP). There are lots of log file tools out there, simple ones like Logwatch, Swatch, Octopussy, or more complex ones like Nagios. For errors which are triggered using WP_Error you … Read more
The problem seems to be you not deciding what is the “staging” server for. If it is for content staging/creation than it is actually a production server from software development POV. Anything that assumes that the software is functioning well and results in something being actually published is part of the production system. You need … Read more
The reality is that what we want is this: http://www.liquibase.org/ Liquibase is an open source (Apache 2.0 Licensed), database-independent library for tracking, managing and applying database changes. It is built on a simple premise: All database changes are stored in a human readable yet trackable form and checked into source control. However our development process … Read more
There may be a better way that I am missing but I am going to give you 2 options: 1.Use XML Export to export your new posts and comments. Then use the WordPress Importer to import the new posts and comments back into the dev database It’s best to import into dev then move the … Read more
@Insanity5902: Deployment of a WordPress site from one box to another has been a PITA since day one I started working with WordPress. (Truth-be-told it was a PITA with Drupal for 2 years before I started with WordPress so the problem is certainly not exclusively with WordPress.) It bothered me that every time I needed … Read more
The reason you remove it is because define(‘RELOCATE’,true); will point every visitor of your site to the admin login. If you are still getting re-directed to the dev server then you need to re-configure your database.